Working Hours: European Parliament Vote

Lord Lamont of Lerwick: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What action they propose to take in response to the European Parliament's vote on limiting working hours.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, the Government were disappointed by the European Parliament vote, because we believe that if workers choose to work more hours, they should be allowed to do so. We have no intention of conceding the opt-out. This issue will have to be decided by co-decision between the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers and we believe that we have strong support among member states.

Lord Lamont of Lerwick: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply and applaud the efforts of the Prime Minister to overturn this economic madness. But given that, despite our opt-out, attempts have been made several times to impose the legislation through the back door—through health and safety, through the European Court of Justice and, now, via the European Parliament—does that not illustrate the risks that there would be in signing yet more pieces of paper, such as the European constitution, that would extend the area that is justiciable by the ECJ and have utterly unintended consequences?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I cannot see that there will be anything in the constitution which would make for more or less of this kind of economic madness, as the noble Lord describes it.

Lord Walton of Detchant: My Lords, is the Minister aware that the opt-out is essential to the medical profession? Any serious reduction in hours of work, especially for junior hospital doctors, could have a marked adverse effect on clinical care in the NHS. Representatives of junior doctors are themselves greatly opposed to the directive because of the effect that it will have on their clinical experience and training.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, we are aware of that issue and totally agree that that would be very unhelpful indeed for the National Health Service.

Lord Brookman: My Lords, my noble friend is at one with me in saying that we prefer to go forwards, rather than backwards. Does he further agree that people sitting on these Benches have fought for most of their lives to try to reduce hours of work from an intolerable position when we started employment? Let us go forward, not backwards, I suggest.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I think that we can all agree to go forwards and backwards—not backwards; some people may want to go forwards and backwards at the same time, but I think that they are a minority group. The disappointment about the parliamentary vote is that the Working Time Directive is already having a very good impact and there is no need to get rid of the opt-out to get that benefit. In fact, the number of long-hours workers in the UK had been rising until 1997, but has fallen by more than 18 per cent between spring 1998 and spring 2004. That is exactly what we like to see and there is now no need to do anything about the opt-out.

Lord Dykes: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that explanation, but did not the old Labour MEPs and the Socialist group in Strasbourg make a real fool of themselves with that ridiculous vote? Are the Government confident that, in the Council of Ministers, they will be able to secure enough support from member states such as Germany, Poland, Latvia and others to ensure that if there were to be a vote, the Government would carry the day? I hope that there will not be a vote, because the British opt-out should be maintained as of its own. Does the Minister agree that there are many other parts of legislation whereby, if workers are exploited by ruthless employers, they can act: they do not need this ridiculous vote in the European Parliament to go backwards, as was suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Brookman?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, what industry is interested in is the Government's position on the matter. I hope that I have made the Government's position very clear. As I said, we are confident that we have support from many member states. This issue is very important to Germany, Poland and Slovakia and we think that we have strong support to maintain the opt-out.

Lord Wedderburn of Charlton: My Lords, on this very serious question for working people, will my noble friend consider the research that tends to show that a very large number of low-paid workers who work very long hours are subject to coercion and undue pressure, which is not relieved by the law as it stands, in exercising their rights? Looking at the law generally, would it not be sensible and reasonable for the Government to put on the employer the burden of proof that no improper pressure was put on workers who have no defence against it, and thereby match certain other parts of employment protection legislation?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, one of the strongest messages that we have had from many people is that their situation would be extremely difficult if they lost overtime as a result of the opt-out coming to an end. Some 1.6 million people would lose overtime payment. We have had a very strong message that they are not at all keen on that.
	The key issue is that the opt-out must be truly voluntary. We have put forward proposals, which have been picked up by the Commission, to make certain that the opt-out does not take place at the same time as the initial contract of employment. That seems a sensible way of dealing with the issue without getting rid of the opt-out.

Baroness Miller of Hendon: My Lords, do the Government consider that the affiliation of Labour MEPs to the socialist group in the European Parliament is compatible with both new Labour and with the pledges that they made in the recent manifesto to bear down on EU legislation?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I had hoped that the Question had a serious purpose and was not tabled simply to embarrass us about the situation regarding MEPs. The Government's view is important, and I hope I have made that very clear.

Baroness Turner of Camden: My Lords, are the Government aware that the unions are becoming increasingly concerned about the rise in stress-related illness in many workplaces? There are quite reasonable grounds for trying to reduce the pressure on such people to work excessive hours.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, it is true that the directive is a health and safety measure. But it is interesting that the UK has one of the best health and safety records in the EU. The latest figures on the rate of fatal accidents at work show that there is only one country with a better record than the UK, which I think speaks for itself.

Lord Blackwell: My Lords, if the Government do not gain a majority in the Council of Ministers, do they have a plan B to protect the opt-out and other legislation that might follow in its path?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I do not think that we should be talking about losing the vote on that. As I said, we have strong support from other member states on this issue.

Polling Stations

Lord Harrison: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What they propose to do to improve the access to polling stations for disabled electors and political party tellers.

Baroness Ashton of Upholland: My Lords, it is the Government's policy that all polling stations should be accessible to all voters. Local councils have a duty to provide polling places which are, so far as is reasonable and practicable, accessible to disabled electors. There are no plans to give political party tellers access to polling stations, other than for the purpose of voting.

Lord Harrison: My Lords, will Her Majesty's Government improve the training of returning officers and, hence, improve the choice and suitability of polling stations so as to eliminate the problems of poor access for disabled voters in the general election and in 2001, as highlighted by Scope?
	Do HMG believe that party political tellers are an integral part of British democracy? I witnessed an upsetting situation whereby an 81 year-old retired headmaster—the Conservative teller at the station where I was number-taking—had wrestled from him a chair that he had taken from within the church in order to sit outside in external exile to do the job from which we all benefit as voters and as the general public. Do the Government understand that they also serve who stand and wait and number-take?

Baroness Ashton of Upholland: My Lords, I agree with my noble friend. I am grateful to him for explaining the background to his Question. It is important that training is provided—it is already. At present, there is a review of the guidance to make sure that it is as up to date as possible. The Government, of course, supply up to 50 per cent of the cost of ensuring accessibility, which is important.
	Noble Lords, and my noble friend in particular, will be aware that it is important that tellers play an appropriate role, which has always been that they should be outside the place where people go to vote. As to particular circumstances, it is a pity that an elderly person, who was willing to participate in that way, was not allowed access to the chair.

Lord Henley: My Lords, bearing in mind the degree of fraud that is possible in the postal voting system, will the noble Baroness do her utmost to make access to polling stations easier for all voters by making it easier to cancel a postal vote once granted? She may be aware that the form for registering a postal vote does not indicate in any way how to cancel that postal vote, should the elector wish to do so.

Baroness Ashton of Upholland: My Lords, as the noble Lord knows, we are looking very carefully at those precise issues. But the noble Lord also raises an important point about accessibility to voting. Your Lordships have heard my cri de cur many times. It is very important that we consider carefully the opportunities for people to be able to vote, particularly those who may be disabled and who may have other responsibilities. As noble Lords will know, we are looking at those issues with the Electoral Commission.

Lord Addington: My Lords, will the Minister give us an assurance that, if new legislation is felt to be needed, it will be passed quickly? If it is not needed, does the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 make sure that returning officers and others not only have a duty but have sufficient resources and enough knowledge to carry out that duty? Most of the problems in that field usually arise because people do not understand what is involved after a ramp has been put in place.

Baroness Ashton of Upholland: My Lords, I have enormous sympathy with the points made by the noble Lord. As the noble Lord is aware, we have accepted a number of the recommendations from the Electoral Commission's Voting for Change report. We will be legislating to establish a framework for an accessibility review of polling places. That is very important, as noble Lords will accept.
	We always have to keep in mind the importance of an understanding of the issues of disability. Perhaps I may say that it is not just about ramps but also other forms of accessibility. I have a visual aid with me, which is used for people who have visual impairment. I have brought it so that noble Lords can look at it today if they wish. It is an important part of a number of measures that we need to have in place to ensure that individuals are enabled to exercise their democratic rights.

Lord Maxton: My Lords, does not my noble friend agree that surely in this modern age it is time that we moved towards electronic voting? It would allow anyone to vote in a variety of different places, and of course would include the disabled. Can we have an assurance that the Identity Cards Bill being introduced today will allow such voting to take place?

Baroness Ashton of Upholland: My Lords, my noble friend has created a little frisson in your Lordships' House at the idea of electronic voting. When we consider the opportunities to participate in a democracy, it is important to think about the methodology of so doing. I have made the point already that when one considers the variety of different people who wish to participate—those with young children, the elderly and the disabled—we must ensure that we provide the opportunity to do so as fully as possible. Certainly—here I speak as a mother—it is true that the generation following us is used to participating in all sorts of things by different means. Security, safety and certainty are critical factors, and no doubt noble Lords will raise these issues in that context when we come to debate the Identity Cards Bill.

Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, in an earlier answer the Minister spoke of the practicality of access to polling stations for disabled people. One of the impracticalities in this area is listed buildings. Can the noble Baroness say whether any plans are afoot to cease using listed buildings as polling stations?

Baroness Ashton of Upholland: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, will not be surprised to hear that I do not know whether we have any plans in that direction. The reason is that local councils themselves must determine which are the most appropriate buildings to use in terms of the geography and layout of their own neighbourhoods and communities, if I may put it that way. However, we know that there is a continuing desire to make appropriate use of neighbourhood facilities, community centres and the like, and in some areas schools have been concerned about losing a day's education for children. That is not always what they wish, and so more effort has been put into finding other buildings. Inevitably, it means that a variety of buildings is used and, equally, we need to look at a range of ways to ensure that they operate successfully—not just on polling day but every day of the year.

Lord Greaves: My Lords, the presence of tellers at polling stations is in effect at the grace and favour of the returning officer and the presiding officer. Does the Minister accept that political party tellers perform a useful function in doing something that they are very keen on, which is to increase the turnout? The purpose of taking down the numbers is to go and knock on the doors of or ring those people who have not yet voted. Would it not be a good idea if practices were standardised around the country because they are very variable? Could this issue be discussed between the political parties and the Electoral Commission to produce, at the least, a code of practice for tellers so that everyone knows what they are and are not allowed to do?

Baroness Ashton of Upholland: My Lords, the noble Lord will know that the last guidance on tellers' practices was issued in 1991 and, indeed, there is a proposal to review it with the Electoral Commission to see whether it needs to be updated. Of course, the noble Lord knows well that tellers have no status in electoral law, but I accept the important role that he attributes to them. However, I say again that it is important to ensure that tellers play that role appropriately so that when an individual enters the polling station to cast his vote, the tellers are not a part of that process. We shall look at this in the review.

Energy Policy

Lord Jenkin of Roding: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	When they expect to publish the results of their review of energy policy.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, the Government remain committed to the framework for energy policy set out in the energy White Paper 2003. However, we keep progress towards our energy policy goals under review. One example is the climate change programme review, which has already shown that we will need to do more to reach our domestic goal for carbon emission reductions. We will be considering the options for correcting the shortfall.

Lord Jenkin of Roding: My Lords, given that the document was leaked to the press, is it not clear that the brief from DTI officials to the incoming Secretary of State, Alan Johnson, has warned bluntly that,
	"key policy targets to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and boost green energy are likely to fail, and that decisions on new nuclear power stations must be taken urgently"?
	Is it not really the case, as that briefing goes on to suggest, that "because Beckett"—that is, of course, Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State at Defra—
	"opposes new nuclear build, the Review has not so far considered whether nuclear should contribute to cutting emissions"?
	Does the Minister recognise that I would not be alone in regarding a review of energy policy which has nothing to say about new nuclear build as nothing short of farcical?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I think that the Prime Minister would agree with the noble Lord. He has already said that there cannot be a debate on climate change without giving nuclear serious consideration, and that is absolutely correct. On the 10 per cent renewables target, the central forecast of the DTI Energy Group is that it will be 8.7 per cent in 2010, but I have to say that a National Audit Office report suggests that we will reach the 10 per cent target with variations on a low estimate of 7.3 per cent and a high estimate of 10.3 per cent. We have said in the past that it is a very tough goal, but it is not impossible to reach; it looks about right.

Lord Tomlinson: My Lords, does my noble friend agree that an electricity generation policy based on a wish and a prayer about the success of renewables is not necessarily reliable even for right reverend Prelates, who lead us in their belief in the efficacy of prayer? Does he further agree, therefore, that if the Government are to have a secure energy policy, they must grasp the nuclear nettle sooner rather than later and not continue to say that the door is not closed? The door should be open in this context so that positive action can be taken now, or we shall be left in breach of our Kyoto obligations.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I agree with my noble friend that the issue is mainly to do with the Kyoto agreement and our environmental objective and not with generating capacity. Generating capacity can be produced, but the two issues here are energy security—whether we are happy with a large proportion of our energy being provided in the form of gas supplies—and the great difficulty of meeting our environmental goals if by 2020 all we have done is replace at the very best our nuclear energy sources with renewables. I think all would agree that that will be very difficult.

The Lord Bishop of Newcastle: My Lords, on these Benches we always pray for the wisdom of our Ministers.
	In the Government's plans for developing new sources of energy, can the Minister say whether they will be pursuing a renewables-only policy or will nuclear—including nuclear fusion, which is potentially one of the few options for large-scale, emission-free power production—be part of the mix? Does he agree that all forms of energy production will be necessary for our future needs?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I shall try to live up to the prayers of the right reverend Prelate on this issue. He is right to say that no energy policy should be based on one source of energy. The whole point is to have a full range of options, and we have certainly never thought in terms of a renewables-only policy. Of course nuclear fusion is central to this, but on a much longer timescale. We have spent a great deal of time trying to make certain that the Institute of Technology Assessment project goes ahead and that we finally come to a conclusion on where it should be located. I say that because it is the Government's view that this is an extremely important long-term project.

Lord Redesdale: My Lords, are the Government going to make a decision on nuclear power without having published the review on what to do with nuclear waste? It is rather strange to be talking about a new nuclear policy when we do not know what to do with the waste we already have. On that basis, can the Minister also tell us, as part of the Government's energy policy, what progress is being made on the microgeneration strategy that is also soon to be published?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, any consideration of changes in policy on nuclear power stations would have to consider the question of what is happening as regards nuclear waste. Work on that is going ahead and would have to form part of the consultation and White Paper that would be necessary if we were to pursue a change of decision on nuclear power stations. I am not certain of the exact position on microgeneration but shall write to the noble Lord and let him know.

Lord Peyton of Yeovil: My Lords—

Lord Hylton: My Lords—

Noble Lords: Peyton.

Lord Peyton of Yeovil: My Lords, in his Answer to my noble friend Lord Jenkin, the noble Lord understandably did not refer to the simple fact that Mrs Beckett at Defra was apparently—according to this document—the centrepiece of opposition to a new nuclear build. I quite understand that the noble Lord was not too keen to deal with that, but I wonder if he could get round to doing so now. Are we right in thinking that the Secretary of State to whom I have referred is at the core of opposition to the nuclear build?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, it is well known that Mrs Beckett has strong views on this issue, but the decision will of course be taken by the whole Government, as indeed were the decisions behind the 2003 White Paper.

Lord Hylton: My Lords, are the Government encouraging—

Weapons in Space

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	Whether they have made representation to the United States Administration over recent proposals from the United States Air Force to deploy weapons in space.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, we have not made representations. A White House spokesman has made it explicitly clear that a current review of space policy by the United States Administration is not about the weaponisation of space.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer. Does he agree that the Washington policy process is a bit like the Brussels policy process? There are always lots of things going on that have not yet reached conclusion, and one has to get at them early. The military-industrial complex—the Pentagon and the arms industry—has been pushing ahead with the development of weapons-based systems for some time, in spite of the fact that they are clearly against the current treaty on outer space. They also appear to assume that if they were to develop them, US facilities in this country—Fylingdales, and so on—would be available to them. Will the Government make it clear to those in the American debate that we would not co-operate in any such development if it were to go any further? It is clear that the Secretary of Defense in the United States, Mr Rumsfeld, wants it to go further.

Lord Triesman: My Lords, the White House issued a statement explicitly on the matter. I shall quote it because it is important to understand intentions:
	"We believe in the peaceful exploration of space, and there are treaties in place and we continue to abide by those treaties".
	So do we in this country. We are completely committed to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which makes it clear that there can be no arms race in space. Each year, there is a resolution on the prevention of an arms race in outer space—the PAROS resolution—at the United Nations. We have supported it each year. The Government remain wholly committed to the proposition that no steps should be taken that create an arms race in outer space.

Lord Garden: My Lords, it is not just a question of the possibility of weapons based in space; there are also weapons systems to deny space systems to nations. With the current space industry in the commercial sector raising $110 billion a year and with the growing dependence, for our own military use, on reconnaissance, communication and navigation, is it not in our own interests to try to preserve space as a common resource for the whole world by extending the Outer Space Treaty to make it more all-encompassing?

Lord Triesman: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Garden, is plainly right that we all wish to see the peaceful use of space rather than the militarised use. We ought to acknowledge that there is a degree of military use of space to which we are also committed. Satellite communications, surveillance, mapping, reconnaissance, early warning, the monitoring of arms control agreements, navigation, sensing and meteorology are all vital to our security and our defence. They are also a resource for research, which we do not always acknowledge in the same way. Those are the legitimate uses, and they seem to me, along with the general scientific thrust, to be the way that we should obey the international treaties to which we are signatories.

Lord Elton: My Lords, to what extent are our military capabilities entirely dependent on such satellites, and what steps have we taken to defend them at times of conflict?

Lord Triesman: My Lords, I do not think that it would be appropriate in your Lordships' House or elsewhere to talk about the defence systems of the United Kingdom's military equipment, except to say that they play a vital role in all the areas that I described. For the purposes of clarification, let me add that every so often the media take a much more fictional view about what is happening in outer space, such as large flying mirrors. Looking back over some of the cuttings since 1950, I think that the United States has consistently been thought to be doing things that are on the edges of fiction and have never become reality.

Lord Elton: My Lords, what proportion of the satellites on which our military capabilities depend actually belong to the United Kingdom?

Lord Triesman: My Lords, for the same reason that I gave a moment ago and with the greatest of respect, I must decline to answer that question. We have our capabilities, the United States has its capabilities, and I shall not speculate further on the relationship.

Commissioner for Older People (Wales) Bill [HL]

Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to establish and make provision about the office of the Commissioner for Older People in Wales; to make provision about the functions of the Commissioner for Older People in Wales; and for connected purposes. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
	Moved, That the Bill be now read a first time.—(Lord Evans of Temple Guiting.)
	On Question, Bill read a first time, and ordered to be printed.

Fraud Bill [HL]

Lord Goldsmith: My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to make provision for, and in connection with, criminal liability for fraud and obtaining services dishonestly. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
	Moved, That the Bill be now read a first time.—(Lord Goldsmith).
	On Question, Bill read a first time, and ordered to be printed.

Merchant Shipping (Pollution) Bill [HL]

Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to enable effect to be given to the Supplementary Fund Protocol 2003 and to future revisions of the international arrangements relating to compensation for oil pollution from ships; to enable effect to be given to Annex VI of the MARPOL convention; and to amend section 178(1) of the Merchant Shipping Act 1995. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
	Moved, That the Bill be now read a first time.—(Lord Davies of Oldham).
	On Question, Bill read a first time, and ordered to be printed.

Privileges

Hybrid Instruments

Personal Bills

Standing Orders (Private Bills)

Deputy Chairmen of Committees

Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I beg to move the five Motions standing in my name on the Order Paper.
	Privileges Moved, That a Committee for Privileges be appointed and that, as proposed by the Committee of Selection, the following Lords together with the Chairman of Committees and any four Lords of Appeal be named of the committee:
	B. Amos (Lord President) L. Brooke of Sutton Mandeville L. Browne-Wilkinson L. Carlisle of Bucklow L. Cope of Berkeley L. Graham of Edmonton L. Grocott L. Mackay of Clashfern L. McNally L. Marsh L. Merlyn-Rees L. Shutt of Greetland L. Strabolgi L. Strathclyde L. Williamson of Horton;
	That the committee have power to appoint sub-committees and that such sub-committees have power to appoint their own chairmen; That the committee have power to co-opt any Lord for the purposes of serving on any sub-committee.
	Hybrid Instruments
	Moved, That a Select Committee be appointed to consider hybrid instruments and that, as proposed by the Committee of Selection, the following Lords together with the Chairman of Committees be named of the committee:
	L. Campbell of Alloway B. Fookes L. Grantchester L. Harrison L. Luke L. Quirk L. Sandberg.
	Personal Bills
	Moved, That a Select Committee be appointed to consider personal Bills and that, as proposed by the Committee of Selection, the following Lords together with the Chairman of Committees be named of the committee:
	V. Allenby of Megiddo L. Geddes L. Greaves V. Simon L. Slynn of Hadley L. Templeman.
	Standing Orders (Private Bills)
	Moved, That a Select Committee on the Standing Orders relating to private Bills be appointed and that, as proposed by the Committee of Selection, the following Lords together with the Chairman of Committees be named of the committee:
	L. Geddes B. Gould of Potternewton L. Luke L. Naseby L. Palmer V. Simon B. Thomas of Walliswood.
	Deputy Chairmen of Committees
	Moved, That, as proposed by the Committee of Selection, the following Lords be appointed as the panel of Lords to act as Deputy Chairmen of Committees for this Session:
	V. Allenby of Megiddo L. Ampthill L. Boston of Faversham L. Brougham and Vaux L. Carter L. Cope of Berkeley L. Elton B. Fookes L. Geddes B. Gould of Potternewton L. Grocott L. Haskel B. Hooper B. Lockwood L. Lyell C. Mar B. Pitkeathley B. Ramsay of Cartvale V. Simon B. Thomas of Walliswood L. Tordoff B. Turner of Camden V. Ullswater.—(The Chairman of Committees.)

On Question, Motions agreed to.

Business

Lord Grocott: My Lords, perhaps I may make the usual comment about timing. I am very grateful that we met the target time yesterday, which was to everyone's advantage. Today, there are 31 speakers. To finish by ten o'clock, no one should speak for longer than 11 minutes. So 11 minutes is today's suggestion.

Address in Reply to Her Majesty's Most Gracious Speech

Debate resumed on the Motion moved on Tuesday last by the Lord Dubs—namely, That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty as follows:
	"Most Gracious Sovereign, We, Your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, beg leave to thank Your Majesty for the most gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament."

Lord Adonis: My Lords, rising to make my own maiden speech at the start of this debate enables me to extend real empathy, and not just mere sympathy, to the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, whose maiden speech we look forward to later.
	I begin by thanking Members from all parts of the House for the incredibly friendly welcome that I have received during the past week. Perhaps I may make special mention of my noble friend Lord Filkin, who served before me at the Department for Education and Skills and who I know earned the deep respect of your Lordships and of the department. It is a great privilege for me to be Member of your Lordships' House. I am very conscious of the duty I owe the House and I will do my best to fulfil it.
	It is my misfortune to have arrived in the House with rather too much publicity. My wife, I am glad to say, took particular exception to the jibe that I am "more Andrew than Adonis" or as the Daily Mail put it touchingly:
	"rarely has a surname been more inappropriate".
	I submit myself to your Lordships' judgment on that point, except to say that, in my case, Adonis has nothing to do with beauty; simply that I hail from Cyprus.
	My father arrived in Britain 45 years ago from a Cyprus which was then, as now alas, deeply troubled. He arrived with little. Listening to the moving speeches earlier in the debate by my noble friend Lord Dubs and the noble Lord, Lord Alliance, about their experience as immigrants, I can only echo their sentiments about this great country which gave us refuge.
	My family and so many other Cypriots who settled here owe everything to the British values of tolerance, opportunity and responsibility. I personally owe more than I can ever repay to my education and to some brilliant teachers and youth workers. It is this which gave me a personal commitment to the cause of education and to overcoming the terrible waste of talent and potential which I saw so graphically on the Camden Town council estate where I grew up. I hope I can contribute something to the cause of education in your Lordships' House alongside so many others on all sides of the House who are committed in the same way.
	The sustained improvement of education, health and the other public services is essential to the gracious Speech. So, too, is the reform of welfare, to meet the contemporary needs of pensioners, the unemployed, the disabled and all others who are dependent on the state. The Government's objective is to create a genuine opportunity society—a society of social mobility where the great majority, not just a minority as in the past, develop their talents to the full through education and life-long learning; where the National Health Service offers the best healthcare to all, free at the point of use; where personalised education and health services, meeting individual needs fully, are the prerogative of every citizen, regardless of background or income; and where the welfare state is an agency both for support and for responsibility, giving citizens the help that they and their families need to forge an independent livelihood wherever possible. This has been the mission of the Labour Government since 1997; it was in the manifesto on which we were re-elected; and the theme of opportunity runs through the gracious Speech.
	I shall take the main areas of debate in turn. On welfare reform, there will be an incapacity benefit Bill to extend greater support for training and work-search to the 2.5 million claimants of incapacity benefit. In the previous Parliament, the pathways to work pilot schemes, extending personal advisers to IB claimants, increased the numbers getting back to work by between 20 and 100 per cent. The Bill that we will bring forward will reinforce the principle of rights and responsibilities, helping the many IB claimants who are able to work to do so while improving long-term assistance for those who are unable to work.
	We propose also to reform housing benefit to empower tenants to take greater responsibility for their own housing choices. Building on the positive results of existing local pilot schemes, we will introduce legislation to permit a flat rate of housing benefit to be paid directly to tenants in privately rented accommodation, rather than to landlords.
	On pensions, the Government fully recognise their obligations. Since 1997, additional state support for pensioners has helped nearly 2 million people out of acute poverty, and pensioner households are, on average, £1,500 a year better off in real terms. But the challenge of an ageing society remains immense. There is the critical savings issue. It is estimated that 3 million people are under-saving for their retirement, and that a further 5 million to 10 million ought to consider saving more. There are also the long-term pressures. During the current Parliament, the number of people over state pension age will overtake the number of children. Thirty years ago, there were almost four people in work for every retired person. Now there are fewer than three and a half people. In 30 years, if we do nothing, there will be only two and a half people. The Government wish to build a consensus for reform on pensions across the parties. After the report of Adair Turner's commission in the autumn, we will come forward with proposals.
	Further radical improvement of the great public services of health and education is at the heart of our third-term programme. The gracious Speech set out reforms to raise standards, extend opportunity, reduce bureaucracy and create more personalised services with greater choice. On health, on which my noble friend Lord Warner will have more to say later, a health improvement Bill will make the vast majority of enclosed public spaces and workplaces smoke free. It will strengthen measures to reduce healthcare-associated infections with a statutory code of practice. It will halve the number of Department of Health arm's-length bodies; modernise the regulation of community pharmacy and ophthalmic services; and, in response to the Shipman inquiry, ensure the safer management of controlled drugs.
	There will be an NHS redress Bill to deal more speedily and effectively with low-monetary-value clinical negligence cases. The existing clinical negligence regime too often forces patients down an adversarial legal route that is fraught with delay, anguish and unnecessary legal expense, which we wish to overcome.
	We will also take forward the Mental Health Bill which was published as a draft Bill in the previous Session and given valuable scrutiny by the Joint Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. The objective of the Bill is to strengthen patients' rights, break the automatic link between compulsory treatment and detention, and improve the legal framework for those who suffer mental disorders. The Government are considering the committee's recommendations carefully and we will publish the Bill in the summer.
	Childcare and education featured prominently in our election manifesto. Children get only one chance at school. It is our duty to give them the best possible chance and to counter much better than in the past the effects of social disadvantage. School standards have risen considerably in recent years, but there is much further to go before we can be satisfied, and many parents need more support. In the early years, all children need the social and communication skills that are necessary to be ready to learn. In primary schools, a child who cannot read cannot learn, and we intend to focus significantly more attention and support on the 20 per cent of children who still go through primary school without learning to read properly, with all the problems that that causes them and society at large in secondary school and beyond.
	At secondary level, and in further and higher education, all our young people ought to be able to choose courses which motivate them, including apprenticeships and vocational courses which have too often been unavailable in the past. Further education is as important to the future of this country as higher education, and our third-term programme will reflect this.
	In terms of legislation there will be a Children, (Contact) and Adoption Bill, which will start in this House. This will strengthen support for parents and children in maintaining contact after the breakdown of relationships and give the courts more flexible powers to facilitate contact and to uphold enforcement orders. There will be new regulation of inter-country adoption and there will be a Bill to protect children and vulnerable adults, implementing key recommendations made by Sir Michael Bichard after the Soham murders.
	On childcare and early years education, we intend to increase parental leave and pay entitlements for mothers and fathers, progressively to extend rights to nursery education and childcare, including family support and healthcare in the most deprived communities, building on the pioneering work of Sure Start. We will provide investment for 3,500 Sure Start children's centres nationwide by 2010. Existing primary schools and the private and voluntary sectors will have a key role to play in this new under-fives provision as, indeed, is already happening up and down the country.
	In respect of schools, a Bill will give local authorities and Ofsted greater capacity to tackle school failure so that we do our utmost to limit the blight caused to children by seriously underperforming schools. The Bill will enable and encourage greater collaboration between schools and colleges to increase the range and quality of vocational and apprenticeship choices available to teenagers beyond the age of 14. It will make it easier for good quality providers of education, including successful state schools, to replace failing schools and to establish new state schools in response to parental demand on the basis of fair all-ability admissions and fair funding. This will also provide opportunities for the Churches and other faith communities, who already make an outstanding contribution to our state education system.
	We also wish to reduce significantly the number and burden of inspectorates and will consult on proposals for a single, lighter-touch inspectorate covering the whole of education, children's services and skills. We are considering how best to take forward the School Transport Bill, which fell at the Dissolution, especially to support greater choice and opportunity for pupils beyond the age of 14.
	I have set out the Government's legislative plans but legal changes alone will only get us so far in improving the public services. Underpinning all we do is sustained investment in people and in facilities, in the doctors, nurses and teachers without whom there would be no NHS or schools, in the modern buildings and facilities they need to do a first-class job and in the extra capacity essential to extending both choice and quality.
	The Government are investing very considerably extra above inflation year on year in both health and education. Our principle is simple, that extra investment should promote both equity and excellence and the reforms needed to achieve both. In the NHS new contracts with better pay are ensuring more flexible working for consultants, GPs and nurses. Vital to reducing hospital waiting times are the new diagnostic and treatment centres focused on particular elective procedures such as cataracts and hip replacements, including facilities run by the new independent providers but with no charges for patients. The new NHS Direct service and walk-in centres are similarly making primary care more accessible and we intend to take all these reforms forward in this parliament.
	In education, a sixfold increase in capital investment since 1997 is making possible the Building Schools for the Future programme, rebuilding or totally refurbishing every secondary school in the country and half of all primary schools over the next 15 years, together with the new academies and Sure Start centres, focused in particular on deprived areas. There will not just be modern classrooms but IT systems, sports, music and arts facilities, childcare, specialist teaching centres, including for children with disabilities, open to their whole communities.
	While facilities are important, the Government have never wavered in their belief that to extend educational excellence to all we need to invest first and foremost in our teachers, elevating teaching to its rightful place as the foremost profession in the country.
	This investment in teaching, too, has driven reform. Larger school budgets have enabled schools to more than double the number of teaching assistants in the past seven years, but it is the new school workforce agreement, ending outdated demarcations, that is transforming their practical usefulness to teachers and pupils alike, including the vital role that assistants now play in literacy and numeracy support in primary schools.
	Similarly, to be successful, every secondary school needs excellent subject specialists in all the main curriculum subjects. Higher salaries are playing an important part in making teaching more attractive to good graduates, but it is reform to teacher recruitment and training which has, for example, encouraged the surge of excellent new mature graduates entering the profession, especially in the shortage areas of maths and science, by enabling them to train directly in schools with a salary instead of by the conventional PGCE route.
	We do not minimise the challenges that remain. School behaviour is a particular concern and we will continue to give the strongest possible support to head teachers and teachers in tackling bad behaviour. But I believe that we can take great heart as a country from the steady improvement taking place year by year in the teaching profession and the results it is achieving, exemplified by the inspirational annual national teaching awards pioneered by my noble friend Lord Puttnam and supported by all parties in this House, celebrating the success of our teachers in every community. This is a strong platform on which to build in the years ahead.
	Let me conclude, if I may, with a longer view. Two months ago the House mourned the death of Lord Callaghan. It is approaching 30 years since, as Prime Minister, Lord Callaghan made his farsighted speech at Ruskin College on the need for higher educational standards to transform the prospects of children from working-class backgrounds. The Ruskin speech launched a national debate on education reform and how to make a reality of equality of opportunity in our society. It is a debate that continues to this day.
	At the start of his speech, Lord Callaghan set out two great maxims of R H Tawney that,
	"the endowments of our children are the most precious of the natural resources of the community",
	and,
	"what a wise parent would wish for their children, so the state must wish for all its children".
	What every wise parent today, regardless of background, wishes for their children is an excellent education developing their talents to the fullest extent. It is what the nation now needs for all its children. It is the vision which animates the gracious Speech and I commend it to the House.

Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. We welcome him to your Lordships' House and to taking up the challenge presented to him by the Prime Minister to lead on the Government's priority in this parliamentary Session—education.
	We have heard much about the Minister in the past week or so. However, I was more interested to read what he thought about the House of Lords before he had an inkling that he was coming here. I will tread carefully as, yes, we are polite in this House and I heartily agree with him that we do not do enough to ensure that much of what we say here is noticed. But the noble Lord should be assured and encouraged that we are an effective revising Chamber, and outward appearances tend to mask an amazing and experienced force for good.
	I therefore urge the Minister to use that force for the benefit of our children's education. To that end, I can assure him that we on these Benches will support him whenever we believe that he is working towards that goal.
	With regard to the content of this debate, I will say now that it is my intention to focus upon education and skills, including social affairs to the extent that our children's education is intrinsically linked to the well-being of us all, the social fabric of our communities and Britain's future. My noble friend Lord Howe will set out our response to the gracious Speech concerning health.
	While I am also new to this brief, I too made my maiden speech on the subject of education, speaking about the failings of the comprehensive system, the need for parental freedom of choice, excellence, aspiration, encouraging our children to want to learn and—through my own experience at school and that gained in the constituency of Slough, where I had fought a parliamentary seat the year before and which has many children from diverse cultures and backgrounds in grammar school—the overwhelming merits of selection and streaming. I well recall being ticked off for being controversial. Now, seven years later, it would not be considered a controversial speech at all—rather, stating the obvious, and I am proud of that.
	Let me say straight away that in response to the gracious Speech we welcome the words used: "parental choice", "freedom for schools" and "discipline". If real action follows those words, we shall support that action. Schools need greater freedom from central control, and that freedom must be coupled with less bureaucracy. Let all head teachers be in charge of their budgets and their admissions. We support the extension of the Government's programme for setting up more city academies. We want to see more real choice given to parents. Choice drives up standards, and raising standards is an imperative. That said, facilities are not a prerequisite for inspirational teaching, but motivated, valued and respected teachers are. Here, I agree with the Minister that we need genuinely to elevate our teachers.
	We on these Benches are greatly concerned that, although it is clear in the gracious Speech that "education remains a priority", we have heard that sentiment expressed since the publication of the 1997 Labour manifesto, which stated:
	"Our task is to raise standards in every school".
	Eight years on, one in three 11 year-olds leaves primary school unable to write properly and 44,000 pupils leave secondary school without a single GCSE. There has been a 30 per cent rise in the number of failing schools in one year. In addition, the United Kingdom has fallen from fourth to 11th place internationally in science results, from seventh to 11th place in reading and from eighth to 18th place in maths. The recent research by David Jesson of York University, which tracked the progress of 28,000 children who scored the highest marks in national curriculum tests at 11, makes very depressing reading. More than half of those pupils went on to 2,407 comprehensives and, by the time they reached the GCSE stage, many of them had been effectively lost because schools had failed to help them achieve their potential.
	Further, no government can pretend to me that we have rising standards in schools when examiners marking an English test taken by 600,000 14 year-olds have been told by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority not to deduct marks for incorrect spelling on the main paper, worth nearly one-third of the overall marks. Has no one worked out that no employer will want to employ them if they cannot get the basics right? The Government must stop focusing on targets and start working towards achieving rigorous, clear and credible exam standards that will genuinely help our young people into the ever more competitive world of work.
	There has been much talk of respect and school discipline. Talk is one thing. We seriously need to see some action. Is the Minister disturbed to hear that only last week a teacher was reported on television as saying, "I do not expect my pupils to respect me"? Will the Minister agree with me that if a teacher does not demand, never mind expect, respect from his or her pupils, we are lost? This is a serious challenge.
	Only last week, I spoke to a teacher who is giving up after many years of dedication because the children are too volatile. He is fed up with walking into a classroom feeling uncertain of what to expect and what he will have to cope with, let alone the teaching. He knows that there is an assault on a teacher every seven minutes, and he is weary and disheartened by pupils just not turning up. More than 1 million children play truant every year. We cannot expect to keep our teachers and head teachers unless we change that—and fast.
	Recently, a group of Swedish schoolchildren were asked for their reactions to the Jamie Oliver programmes on Channel 4, promoting more nutritional school meals—a no-brainer in my book, but never mind. The children's response was quick and clear. Having seen the inside of some of our schools in action, they were heard to say, regardless of the school meals issue, "We would never want to attend a British school".
	Given that one in five appeals panel decisions results in the head being overruled and forced to readmit disruptive pupils who have been expelled, it is also time for the Government to act to support our teachers. We must give heads the final say over exclusions. We know that such unruly and intimidating behaviour extends into our neighbourhoods, villages and towns. It is unacceptable and does our children no service as they look towards employment.
	We do not need yet another politically correct quango or taskforce to think about behaviour in our schools and respect in our society. It is common sense; give me—a parent of three teenagers—a room, a couple of parents and half an hour of straightforward discourse to set out the simple reasons why. In essence, it is about giving children boundaries; it is about instilling respect and a sense of self worth; and it is about committed parenting and giving children real time, no matter how tired or burdened parents may be in coping with their daily lives, keeping open those delicate, difficult channels of communication, even when it is painful, difficult and incredibly frustrating to do so. There needs to be a much stronger emphasis on the work/life balance in our pressurised world. Where necessary, it is about investing in and extending support to parents. We must stop blaming the children for their behaviour and labelling all teenagers as bad; it is just not true.
	With regard to higher education, why do the Government insist on the arbitrary target of 50 per cent of pupils attending university? Will the Minister accept that that target simply achieves the negative effect of making those who do not attend university feel that they have somehow failed? Why have a cap at all? Should we not be encouraging young people to consider a breadth of options that feel right for them? Yes, we need more vocational education and training.
	There needs to be consistency of funding principles. For example, given that we understand that the Minister is in favour of involving the private sector in developing city academies, does he feel comfortable with a system that in effect forces universities to seek to rely on foreign income to underpin university finances—a situation that is set to continue notwithstanding top-up fees? Does he think it right that universities should have quotas for fee-paying foreign students that are not based on merit—a fact clear from some university websites—at the expense of our own students, thus putting foreign students at a clear advantage over our own? Is not the British parent right to expect that his or her children should have priority of opportunity? How does that square with the Secretary of State's statement yesterday in another place that she wanted to extend opportunities for all children to succeed on the basis of their hard work and merit, not on the basis of their privilege?
	In the past eight years, we have had three manifestos, nine Acts of Parliament, five Green Papers, three White Papers, two strategy documents and four Education Secretaries. For what, with truancy up by a third, one in three pupils leaving primary school unable to read and write properly and a teacher attacked every seven minutes?
	In this Session, we have 18 months in which seriously to consider these issues. For example, when we talk about choice, how does that work in our rural communities? When we talk about freedom, how can we effectively reduce the appalling level of bureaucracy to liberate our teachers so that they can get on with what they do best—teaching? Financial investment in our education is right, but it is not the end game. Good intentions, eye-catching initiatives and talk of new laws that resonate well at election time do not make a difference.
	Today, we have heard from the Minister much about progress and investment in our education system, but sadly, and with great respect, the statistics just do not support the rhetoric. I am sure that the Minister, together with all noble Lords, will agree that playing clever politics must never take priority over our children's future. They are too important.

Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, I, too, look forward to working with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and I am delighted to see that he has the sense of humour that we all need to do our job in your Lordships' House.
	We come to today's debate after a general election, the results of which had much for my party to be happy about. We were the only party substantially to increase our percentage of the vote, and we increased our representation in the House of Commons by about 20 per cent. In stark contrast to the other parties, one of which has a leader who has jumped before he was pushed, and the other which has a leader who is being pushed but will not jump, we have a leader with whom we are very happy. He spent the election talking about our positive policies for public services and giving credit to other politicians with whom we do not agree for being conscientious about their own beliefs, even if we think that they are mistaken.
	I am particularly pleased that he talked about the principles of freedom, fairness and trust that underpin our political agenda. I am particularly unhappy that much of the election was fought on managerial issues such as school discipline and clean hospitals, rather than on the principle of what sort of country we want to live in. No policy area affects the sort of country in which we want to live in the future more than education. Therefore, questions about what is delivered, in what quality, how it is delivered, by whom it is delivered and to whom they are accountable are crucial to that wider agenda. I will focus my remarks on education, and my noble friend Lady Barker in winding up the debate will focus on health.
	In education terms, I want to live in the sort of country where early disadvantage is evened out and every child and every teacher has the opportunity to fulfil his or her full potential. By developing good teachers and good school leadership, we provide the means by which our children can achieve and enjoy their school years. Children and their teachers are only two sides of the triangle of educational delivery. A lot has been said by the Government and the Official Opposition about parent power. Parents are the most influential factor in the development and happiness of every child. We on these Benches would like to see the state as an enabler, helping people to become expert parents as well as loving parents in the interests of their children; not interfering unless it is absolutely necessary in the interests of the child but providing high-quality services equally available to support all parents to do the most important job any of us ever has to do.
	There seems to be a considerable tension between the Government's stated aim of giving parents more power and some of their recent and proposed legislation. For example, how can parents have more power in 200 city academies when the number of parents on the governing body is being reduced from two to one, with that one appointed by the proprietor of the school? How can parents have more power when schools no longer have to hold an annual parents' meeting if they do not want to, or issue an annual parents' report? What do the Government mean by "streamlining governing bodies"? How can parents have more power over the future status of the primary school that is considering becoming a foundation school, when the Government propose that that will be done in future by a simple vote of the governing body? The two parent-governors on the board can easily be outvoted.
	The fact is that most of the legislation that we are led to expect from the gracious Speech and the DfES press release is unnecessary. The Government took powers to expand their city academies programme only a few months ago in Part 2 of the Education Act 2005. Another example is the Government proposals for the privatisation of primary schools, for that is what foundation status really means. Why do we need more legislation for that? Section 35 of and Schedule 8 to the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 already allow it. Now is the time for the Government to focus on good practice and proper resourcing. Good implementation of legislation relies on winning hearts and minds, bringing about cultural change and really listening to those who know. We need to allow existing legislation to bed in and concentrate on good practice.
	I have briefly mentioned the plans for 200 more city academies. Let me say right from the outset that we on these Benches are absolutely in favour of pouring more resources, both human and financial, into failing schools or schools that face multiple challenges of deprivation and poverty. However, we do not believe that it is wise to put our schools outside local accountability on the unevaluated basis of what the Minister's predecessor described from that Dispatch Box as an "experiment". Only three of the existing academies have been inspected by Ofsted so far and one, the Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough, has failed. Staff morale was low, and GCSE results were lower than the two failing schools that it replaced. There is no evidence that academies will, "boost attainment and opportunity", to use the Government's own words.
	The Government are rightly keen on their Every Child Matters agenda, but how does putting £5 billion into 200 schools help every child? The academies programme is not a panacea for all the problems in our secondary schools. A government elected by 22 per cent of those eligible to vote have no mandate to give away 200 of our secondary schools to the private or voluntary sector, even if all 22 per cent had been aware that was in Labour's manifesto, which I am sure they were not. The department's statement says:
	"New providers will enter the state system subject to parental demand, fair funding and fair admissions".
	Where is the demand from parents for 95 per cent of the control over their local school to be given to someone who is prepared to put up about 5 per cent of the money for a new school? When parents realise that fact, as in Durham, they get up and fight it. Primary schools have not escaped the Government's privatisation agenda. The sole purpose of becoming a foundation school is to have control over your own admissions. Allowing it by a simple vote of the governing body could make it difficult for a Director of Children's Services to maintain the expected strategic oversight over the Every Child Matters agenda, with the potential for literally thousands of new admissions bodies to be set up.
	We in this House did a lot of work on the Ofsted elements of the last Education Bill, and now the Government are planning to tinker with it again. Opposition Peers persuaded the Government to allow parents to continue to have input into the new light-touch inspections. They needed some persuading—not a sign of a Government genuinely dedicated to giving parents real power in the education of their children. I will not say much about the proposal to allow parents more power to trigger an Ofsted inspection, except that we will need safeguards against witch hunts by a small group of parents of a head teacher whose methods they do not like.
	The idea that Ofsted should have the power to close a school is certainly an error. It is another step in the Government's attempts to sideline LEAs. It should be for Ofsted to tell us what the problems are and for the LEA and the school to tell us what they are going to do about them. From these Benches, we would like to see a much more independent school inspection system under the auspices of the National Audit Office, to provide the accountability for how public money is spent, which we all believe in.
	I mentioned earlier that discipline in schools was on the "shopping list" on which parties were campaigning during the election. There is no doubt that this is a very important matter, which we have debated many times in Your Lordships' House. Every child has a right not to have his or her education interfered with by high or low-level disruption, and every teacher has the right to do his or her job without fear of violence. There is not time to say too much about this, but it is a complex problem that requires a complex, mature approach, not a knee-jerk reaction. You can exclude children from a school, but you cannot eliminate them and make them go away. We have to do something serious about it.
	From these Benches our first emphasis would be on prevention; first, by providing children with a curriculum that they see as relevant to them and equipping them for the life that they will lead when they leave school. The Government have indicated their intention to adopt some of the recommendations of the Tomlinson report about 14-to-19 education, but sadly they have fallen into the trap of popularism instead of having the courage to stand up and say, "We need to take a root-and-branch reforming look at this stage of education". My noble friend Lady Sharp will say more about that.
	Services provided to children with special needs need to be improved, both in school and out. During the election I visited a number of schools and a common factor that emerged was the lack of resources to tackle the many complex needs of so many of our children. We all know that many excluded children have special needs that have not been properly addressed, despite all the best will in the world from the school. It is a matter that deeply concerns many teachers who feel they are failing these children despite their best efforts.
	Secondly, we give a cautious welcome to the proposal for a leadership commission of experienced heads to look at school discipline, but only if the answers to the following questions are satisfactory. Will this group be just another quango or will it be a genuine working party? Will it make all haste in gathering the best strategies that work and ensuring that this best practice is disseminated widely to the teaching body? Since this will bring the need for in-service training, will the Government provide schools with the necessary resources to enable staff to take advantage of the findings of this commission and be trained to put them into practice?
	If the Government are listening to the profession, that will be a refreshing change and we will support them. I will listen carefully to the Minister's answers, or perhaps he will write to me.
	Thirdly, we would put into place measures to ensure that all schools have a strong management team with coherent and consistent policies about school behaviour, backed up by the LEAs who support them and parents who are involved by the school at every stage of the process.
	Fourthly, we would ensure that resources are diverted into providing separate full-time appropriate education for children who have to be excluded either from their class through on-site units, or, as a very last resort, from the school through managed transfer to another school or a full-time pupil referral unit. Tackling the matter effectively must be a priority and will have an effect not just on the children concerned and their classmates, but, as we also know from research, on the rate of youth offending.
	I now move to the proposals that local authorities are to have new duties to procure childcare. We will have to look at the detail. It is certainly a very important matter for the future. However, following the Children Act 2004 I have great concerns about the Government's plans for the children's workforce. They need to be coherent and properly funded. It is the professionals who often make the difference to a child who has problems or whose parents suffer from major challenges.
	There has been a regular flow of new laws, regulations, action plans and more pilots than the RAF. Yet low pay, low qualifications, high stress, high vacancy rates, a lot of temporary and agency staff and a confused qualifications structure beset the sector. We would establish a "climbing frame" of qualifications for people wishing to improve their skills in the childcare sector. We need to encourage all childcare professionals to study and undertake in-service training if the high quality we all want for our children is to be delivered. If the Every Child Matters agenda is to be achieved all these matters need to be addressed and I and many professionals within the sector have not seen the commitment to putting in the resources to deal with these challenges.
	On the teaching workforce, I draw the House's attention to the Government's appalling record on teachers who are qualified to teach core subjects and my party's manifesto commitment to addressing that issue. What do the Government propose to do about it?
	We look forward to working with the Minister on the child contact and inter country adoption Bill, the vulnerable groups Bill and the childcare Bill. We will look carefully at the details of these Bills and will support the Government where they are putting the welfare of the child first and foremost in the measures they are proposing. The measures also need to be workable in practice and give due weight to the child's human rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. These are the principles on which we will judge them.
	We will also be asking questions about resources and the workforce who will have to put the new measures into practice. I already have concerns that the DfES has reduced the number staff working on inter-country adoptions even though demand is rising. Limiting the access by telephone to the four officers left behind is not an answer. How can potential adoptive parents reach them with queries if this is done? I declare an interest in that my Chinese-speaking son who lives in China has spent three years trying to adopt a Chinese child to complete his family. The whole thing had been a long drawn-out nightmare of British, not Chinese, bureaucracy.
	I note there will be an equality Bill and wonder whether age equality—putting children on same footing as adults in terms of their rights—will be contained in it. Will it contain measures to give children the same protection from assault as adults?
	There will be another asylum and immigration Bill. I trust Ministers will keep in mind the need to provide better services and protection for asylum-seeking children and use the opportunity of the Bill to make a difference.
	There is one particular provision that I regret is missing from the gracious Speech and that is a youth justice Bill. A draft Bill was announced in the Queen's Speech 2004 but nothing was introduced. We badly need this Bill to make custody a last resort for juveniles and community sentences with a strong education element the norm. If the welfare of the child is put at the heart of youth justice, the Government will achieve their aim of reducing reoffending and everyone will be happy.
	I end by commenting that the Labour manifesto of 2005 in relation to education looks remarkably like the Conservative manifesto of 2001 and therefore my colleagues and I will have no problems in opposing certain elements of it. However, I assure the Minister that where we think he is doing the right thing he will have our enthusiastic co-operation, but where we think he is wrong he will have our vigorous opposition and we will use all the powers given to us to try and change his mind.

The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth: My Lords, I join others in your Lordships' House in warmly congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, on his maiden speech. He is strongly committed to improving the education that our children and young people receive and is immensely creative in his approach. We have heard in his speech today direct evidence of the intellectual acumen that he has brought to his advisory role over the past eight years. I look forward not only to enjoying his future contributions to debates in your Lordships' House but to having a close partnership with him in his ministerial work as I did with his two predecessors, the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton. Perhaps I might humorously remark that if the noble Lord continues to be bothered by the unkind nonsense of public comment, he can rest assured that we will not bear him in mind for the next vacant bishopric.
	From his own words about his country of origin, I see that the Minister is a living reminder of the importance of clarity and the difference in meaning between three terms that are all too often elided in public discourse: multicultural, multiethnic and multifaith. For me, "multicultural" started when as a small boy in the 1950s I was taken regularly to a Chinese restaurant in Edinburgh, which was not common in those days. "Multiethnic" meant being brought up to be proud of and to value the traditions of the country of my mother's origin across the North Sea. "Multifaith" meant understanding the Jewish boy in my class at school. Although the census of 2001 does not reveal our nation as overwhelmingly multifaith, with 71.7 per cent claiming to be Christian and the next largest faith group—Muslim—being 3.1 per cent, we cannot work too hard at building up understanding between different faiths. Schools have a vital role to play in that—a point to which I shall return later.
	I welcome the emphasis and the priority that education is given in the gracious Speech. Our education system in England and Wales is built on a close partnership between Church and state. As chairman of the Church of England Board of Education, I have the privilege of serving the Church end of that axis; the state end of which is represented in the House by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. That partnership is sometimes misunderstood or misrepresented by people who speak of it as serving a sectarian interest. Nothing could be further from the truth, although I admit that there may be one or two well publicised suggestions to the contrary in isolated places.
	The Church of England's commitment over the past two centuries has been to provide education for all comers—long before government got around to it—based on Christian belief and values and open to everyone. I said "and open to everyone", not "but", because it is a fundamental aspect of Christianity in its fullest form that we should seek to break down all the barriers, social and ideological, that divide our local communities.
	Church of England schools serve a far wider clientele than practising members of the Church of England. They serve, in very many cases, Free Church families as well as those of other Christian traditions. In many parts of the country, they serve large sections of families of other faith traditions—particularly in places such as Bradford—that value an education that honours God and respects religion. They want to serve all in their communities who seek the education that they offer.
	Where such schools are prevented from doing so, it is through lack of space. As the number of Church of England secondary schools grows, I am particularly pleased that we are able to make common cause with colleagues of other traditions. Already there are joint Church of England and Roman Catholic schools, and their number is growing. We are able to build on the existing partnerships, as new joint schools with the Methodists and the Free Churches are planned. Your Lordships may be aware that, through an initiative of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, there are high hopes that a joint Christian, Jewish and Muslim secondary school might be established. That would be a significant prize.
	There is a great deal of energy in the parishes and dioceses around the country that is committed to serving the cause of education, and I pay tribute to it. That energy is bearing fruits of all kinds. Only recently, the Right Reverend David Young, one of my predecessors as chairman of the Board of Education and National Society, laid the foundation stone of the David Young Community Academy in Leeds, in his former diocese of Ripon. That academy will serve a community in Leeds that does not enjoy the advantages in life that many of us have enjoyed.
	For such communities, the task of improving educational standards for all is not a matter of remote interest. It is not just a form of words in a speech far from the reality of their daily existence. It is fundamental to the chance that countless young people have of enjoying a fulfilled life. Such a life is one in which all the gifts and talents implanted by God, as Christians believe, can develop and flourish—for the benefit of not only the individual and their families, but the communities in which they live and, indeed, the whole of society. The cause of continuing to improve standards is urgent. There are still far too many young people who let themselves and their family down because they are let down by the system that should both challenge and support them.
	I am happy to say that the David Young Community Academy in Leeds will not be the last contribution that the Church of England makes to the academies programme. Diocesan directors of education are engaged in conversations that might lead, if all led to a satisfactory outcome, to 23 Church of England academies. I am aware that the academies programme has been criticised, sometimes unfairly. Some of that concerns the structural relationship between them and the LEA schools. In that connection, I gently point out that it is Board of Education policy for all teachers at Church of England academies to be registered with the GTC and for RE to reflect the kind of broad, mainstream and multifaith—not merely multicultural and multiethnic—syllabus that is standard throughout our dioceses.
	It has been suggested that the sponsors of academies exercise undue control over their schools—that they are rich men buying influence to serve their own ends. I do not believe that to be the case. The commitment of sponsors who support the programme is of direct benefit to the overall educational enterprise. Their energy and imagination can bring welcome innovation. Where that is coupled—as it is in a number of cases—with the Church of England's long experience and deep roots in the education service, it can bring lasting benefit.
	Perhaps not surprisingly in this part of the debate on the gracious Speech, I have concentrated on the Church's part in the education system in England and Wales, but I would not want that emphasis to be misunderstood. We maintain a strong commitment to the whole of education and believe that there is much to admire in schools of all kinds, in the dedication and imaginative work of teachers and those who support them. Our country is profoundly indebted to them.
	I have listened to the public debate over the past few weeks about school discipline and respect. Of course it is true that not all pupils and students are as self-disciplined or well motivated as we should like. There is a problem, and it has to be addressed. I welcome the initiative that the Secretary of State announced last week, which should lead to the Government publishing useful guidance on school discipline. But I confess to being a little nervous, because "respect" is a complex, relational term that cannot suddenly be fought back in the face of an overreaction against the undue deference of a bygone age. Respect is more likely to emerge when there are clear expectations on the part of all those involved in that relationship—student, teacher, parent, ancillary staff, voluntary helper, everyone. I can think of good examples where that has happened, such as St Luke's School in downtown Portsmouth.
	There are so many teachers already working brilliantly with sometimes difficult pupils, and so many hard-working, self-disciplined, variously gifted and rightly ambitious young people—some of whom wear hoodies. I do not want them undermined. There is so much achievement of which to be proud. Let us not knock it.

Baroness Jay of Paddington: My Lords, I follow the right reverend Prelate in congratulating my noble friend Lord Adonis on his excellent maiden speech and welcoming him to the House. I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Warner on his ministerial promotion, and say how glad I am that he is back at the Department of Health. It is on an area of health and social affairs that I would like to focus this afternoon. Throughout this debate on the gracious Speech, most noble Lords who have spoken have said that this is certainly not a government running out of steam. On health alone, about three major Bills will come before your Lordships this Session.
	I have one point of caution for my noble friend Lord Warner, which is that I hope that the ministerial team in the Department of Health will devote as much energy to seeing that those measures that have already come into force are taken forward, with the sort of clarity and energy as one would expect, as they will spend in the time on new legislation. It was my experience during the campaign that everyone recognised the huge improvements made in healthcare by the Government, but did not always feel that local delivery necessarily matched up to national aspirations and policy.
	Having said that, I welcome the proposed new measures to be introduced on health improvement, particularly the proposals to restrict tobacco use in public places. On that important public health topic, I suspect that the Government may have been encouraged to act by the important international examples that have taken place, particularly the successful introduction of similar measures in the Republic of Ireland in the past year. I suspect that another influence has been the continuing pressure for action by individual Members of both Houses of Parliament. Noble Lords will remember the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, introducing his Private Member's Bill on tobacco advertising in the previous Parliament. After a great deal of hard work by individual Members of your Lordships' House, that became official government policy and, eventually, an official government Act.
	Some of the same factors may apply to the issue to which I want to draw noble Lords' attention, which is assisted dying. I would like to spend a few minutes on that complex and difficult but fundamentally important subject. As the House will remember, assisted dying for the terminally ill was proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, in two Bills considered by it during the previous Parliament. The second Bill was sent to a Select Committee chaired by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who was once Lord Chancellor. I was privileged to be a member of that committee.
	We worked hard on the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, for about eight months and produced a unanimous report right at the end of the most recent Session. The report was published on 4 April. Not surprisingly, it was somewhat lost in the pre-election fervour of that week and the subsequent campaign. The committee called for an early opportunity for our report to be considered by your Lordships. We also recommended that if a similar Bill were introduced in this new Session, it should have a formal Second Reading and then be considered by a Committee of the whole House. I very much hope that both a take-note debate on the Select Committee report and a new Bill will appear on our Order Paper very shortly.
	This was the second committee in your Lordships' House on assisted dying in which I have taken part. A decade ago I was a member of the Select Committee on Medical Ethics, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Walton, which in 1994, again unanimously, recommended firmly that there should be no change in the law. That earlier committee concluded that to alter the law to admit any form of voluntary euthanasia would remove a cornerstone of law and social relationships, even in circumstances when a terminally ill person had asked for assistance in dying.
	The principles behind the Walton committee's conclusions remain strongly held by many people. I am sure that there will be further opportunities to debate those principles both in the take-note debate and later, as well as other broader ethical issues that arise in this Chamber.
	My concern this afternoon is not to discuss fundamentals but to draw the Minister's attention to the changes of the past 10 years which have certainly altered my views on this subject since I was a member of the Walton committee. The Government should consider them carefully when responding to any new Bill that is introduced.
	The first, and perhaps most important, change is that today we can draw on practical international experience. In the past decade, several countries and one state of the United States have legally introduced different types of assisted dying. Some jurisdictions permit voluntary euthanasia by physicians and others allow assisted suicide by individual patients.
	Members of the Select Committee were able to visit the Netherlands, Switzerland and the state of Oregon to see for ourselves how different systems worked. Personally I found those visits reassuring. After several years of practice, and contrary to widespread speculation, there was no evidence of a "slippery slope", and the number of people who took advantage of the new laws seemed to be very small and rather stable.
	On all our visits, although there remained quite vocal local opposition, I was impressed by the general feeling of those we met that the availability of assisted dying had given patients greater choice and reassurance at the end of their lives. The overarching view was that the human rights of individual citizens had been improved.
	Universally, as your Lordships know, there is greater attention to human rights and individual autonomy in medical practice, and it is those changes of emphasis that have partially influenced the opinions of many healthcare professionals in this country.
	For example, in its evidence to the Select Committee, the Royal College of Physicians, which on that occasion represented the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, told us that it had moved from opposition to earlier proposals to one of neutrality on the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Joffe. In another session the chairman of the General Medical Council told us that if the Joffe Bill had become law,
	"it would present no insurmountable problems for the GMC".
	The representatives of the Royal College of Nursing remained opposed to change when they appeared before us. However, since then, I have been interested to read the animated debate at the RCN annual conference, which showed a much greater variety of opinion among nurses than RCN leaders had suggested to us. It seems likely that opinion is changing in that profession as well.
	Overall, health professionals now take the view that permitting assisted dying is a decision for society as a whole. It is for Parliament, not the medical practitioners or health care professionals, to decide.
	To gauge the views of society—in so far as one can—the Select Committee decided not to commission our own public opinion surveys, but to set up a review of the surveys that had taken place in the past two decades. That review by Market Research Services concluded:
	"It is evident that there is a great deal of sympathy at least for the concept of euthanasia and it seems likely that the level of sympathy has grown in recent years".
	Certainly NOP polls commissioned by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society in 2002 and 2004 showed 80 per cent support for the proposition that,
	"a person who is suffering unbearably from a terminal illness should be allowed by law to receive medical help to die, if that is what they want".
	Interestingly, since the Select Committee report was published in April, YouGov conducted a poll during the general election campaign showing that 45 per cent of respondents said that they would be more likely to support an election candidate who supported the specific provisions of the Joffe Bill than one who did not.
	However, I am sure that much more work needs to be done on testing public attitudes to a change in the law and the complexities of social policy that arise. I had hoped that that Select Committee could use focus groups or more in-depth discussion to approach the general issues of assisted dying rather than simply relying on question and answer polls, but time and resource constraints prevented that happening.
	None the less, the Government should note the consistently positive response of the public to proposals for a change in the law. The increasing support combines with the changing attitude of healthcare professionals and the evidence of practice in other countries to work together to create a very different environment from that of 10 years ago when your Lordships previously considered this proposal.
	We have been told by the Government from the Prime Minster downwards that in this Parliament they will "listen and learn". I hope that when a new Bill on assisted dying is introduced in this House, Ministers will carefully follow that maxim, and consider very carefully indeed the position they should take in the changed world of 2005. I look forward to my noble friend's reply tonight, but I would neither hope nor expect it to be definitive.

Lord De Mauley: My Lords, I start by thanking your Lordships on all sides for making me most welcome in your Lordships' House. I am grateful for the empathy of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and humbly congratulate him on his maiden speech. I also thank especially the wonderful members of staff who make it their business to welcome the new and inexperienced.
	I am slightly disappointed that there has been no more than a brief mention of pensions in the gracious Speech. I am sorry, too, that the electorate, a sizeable proportion of whom are interested in this question, were denied an opportunity to take the Government's intentions into account in the general election.
	I am well aware, however, that the new Work and Pensions Secretary has plans and that, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, mentioned earlier, the Pensions Commission is due to issue its second report in the autumn. If the delay means that at last a consistent policy can be adopted, it may be worth the wait. Given that wait, I urge that the eventual legislation is introduced under the scheme for legislative scrutiny, both to achieve the level of consensus that the Work and Pensions Secretary wishes and to ensure a well debated and high-quality piece of legislation.
	The Pensions Act 2004 introduced a number of changes, many of which were overdue. However, it leaves a number of problems. In its deliberations, the Pensions Commission identified the following four options to address the major problem of an ageing population: first, pensioners becoming poorer relative to the rest of society; or, secondly, taxes or national insurance contributions to fund pensions increasing; or, thirdly, savings rising; or, fourthly, average retirement ages rising. While the report makes it clear that the first of those is unattractive, it suggests that any solution will require careful use of the three remaining options.
	Taking the Pensions Commission's options in order and setting aside, as the commission has, the option of allowing pensioners to become poorer relative to the rest of society, the next option concerns an increase in taxes or national insurance contributions earmarked for pensions. This is what has come to be known as "compulsion", although we should not forget that we already have compulsion in the shape of national insurance contributions themselves.
	The danger with increased compulsion is that those who simply cannot afford to pay extra taxes or NICs—the very people we are worried about—will be forced to borrow. In Australia, where compulsion has indeed been adopted, that is what has happened, leading to a fall in net savings. It seems unfair, too, on the current generation to have to pay in cash for the funding of the pension system, representing, as this would, a double burden on them, given that they already pay high national insurance contributions.
	If the plan turns out to be that employers are to be required to bear part of the burden of increased taxes or national insurance contributions to fund the increased pension benefits—here I must declare an interest as a director and controlling shareholder of a small business—should small businesses be compelled to make further contributions to their employees' pension schemes, in addition to paying existing national insurance contributions, there is a considerable danger either that, to contain costs, the jobs of the very people for whom we are seeking to provide will be the first to be cut or, in extreme cases, that there will be corporate bankruptcy and consequent redundancy. Let us not forget that our businesses have to compete in a global economy and that increases in costs cannot always be passed on.
	Turning to the Pension Commission's third option—increasing savings—the area where it seems to me attention is most needed is the lower paid and especially their ability and willingness to save. Of particular concern is that the means-testing of pension credits is a clear disincentive to lower-paid people to save. If a pensioner has modest savings, he quite simply loses out.
	That compounds existing disincentives to save, which include a lack of confidence in stock markets and independent advice, well publicised failures of businesses and pension providers, and a fear of retrospective changing of the rules of the game, such as the removal of the £5 billion worth of beneficial tax treatment from private pension arrangements.
	Poorer people of course have less income from which to save. But that does not mean that it makes sense that they should be actively discouraged from saving. I would like to see proposals including, first, tax incentives to save at the lower income end, to improve savings and provide a boost to our stock market, which would in turn increase the value of those savings. Secondly, given the impetus better to equip our children for their adult lives—to which the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred—we should include in the school curriculum education about savings and the need to make provision for retirement. Thirdly, there should be increased flexibility in the use of retirement funds. Why should you not, for example, use part of your pension fund to avoid the dispossession of your house if that is threatened, or even to help to educate your children? If we incentivise people and give them the knowledge, power and flexibility to make their own decisions, history shows they can do that well.
	I turn now to the Pension Commission's fourth option—an increase in retirement age. Illustratively, according to the Pensions Policy Institute, a man in 1946 had a 50 per cent chance of collecting his pension for at least 12 years. In the early 21st century, that has risen to 20 years. This means that the working population is now going to be supporting Mr Average for two-thirds longer than it was in 1946.
	It is very clear that if the state pension age were to be increased, a higher pension could be paid to each pensioner. Of course, the difficulty with increasing the pension age by compulsion, instantly, is that it would be enormously unfair on those who, having retirement in sight, suddenly found themselves having to work for another five years. It is a step in the right direction, therefore, that under the Pensions Act 2004 people have been incentivised to defer their retirement voluntarily in return for increases when the benefit is taken.
	The increase in life expectancy means that it would be unreasonable for young people not to expect to retire later than their shorter-living parents and grandparents. Indeed, a report by HSBC, referred to in the Times recently, based on interviews with more than 11,000 adults in 10 countries, including Britain, found a growing acceptance that people would have to retire later to ease the burden on pensions and taxation. It would not be unfair to reset the system so that people who are my age and younger had our state pension age raised to 70, or even to 72—the age to which the Pensions Policy Institute has indicated that the statistics point. We would not be alone in making changes here. The United States is increasing its state pension age, in moves started as long ago as 1983, to 67, and other countries are also reported to be moving in the same direction.
	We would, of course, have to make some fundamental changes to attitudes and rules. In a letter to the Times last week, a 58 year-old applicant for two jobs in the Civil Service lamented that he had been turned down for both, the reason given to him being that there was no possibility of him working beyond 60, the retirement age for most government employees, regardless of fitness and willingness to continue.
	The advantages of later retirement are substantial. First, in addition to the saving of the pension payment itself, tax on earnings continues to be paid during the period of continued employment. Secondly, assuming a reasonably buoyant labour market, having more people in employment increases output, and, indeed, older people will have to remain economically active, given the demographic changes that are taking place. Thirdly, for many people their quality of life is enhanced by their work environment. Much has been written and said about the high proportion of older people suffering from ill health, and of course provision must be made for them. But the encouragement of those older people who are capable of doing so to continue working will, in many cases, improve the prospects for their health, leading potentially to a reduced burden on the National Health Service.
	It seems to be generally accepted that the aim of a state pension scheme is to protect those who have been unable through life to provide adequately for their retirement, to protect them from poverty and to allow them to maintain their dignity. My Lords, let us do that.

Lord Dearing: My Lords, it is my privilege to congratulate the noble Lord on his maiden speech. I congratulate him on the subject, as there is no more important one facing us. I congratulate him on the positive way he approached it, suggesting that we have some use in life after a certain age. I am sure that the noble Lord will engage our attention on many future occasions with his knowledge of banking in this country and overseas, accountancy, computer networking and, perhaps especially, of the Territorial Army, where I understanding he has the rank of a commanding officer. Sir, congratulations.
	I now turn to the other maiden speaker, who had the awesome task of making his speech from the Government Bench. I warmly welcome the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to his office and wish him well in it. When I got hold of a copy of the Labour Party's election manifesto, I noticed with pleasure that education remained the top priority. I suspect that the noble Lord may have lent a hand in the drafting of that manifesto. If so, I thank him very much. I also noticed that within education, the emphasis was on schools, and I welcome that. An issue that has engaged the attention of the House many times is the social imbalance in access to our universities. The only way that we can address the issue successfully is through the schools. By the time someone is of university age, it is too late. That is a powerful and difficult problem, and we must work on it.
	For me, perhaps the most difficult and testing issue in education is the low performance of too many of our young people, and its correlation with social class. The Government's five-year strategy compared a child with high cognitive ability—I think those are the correct words—born to parents of low social class to a child with relatively low cognitive ability born to parents of high social class and showed that, by the age of eight, the less gifted child born in the well-heeled home will have overtaken the other child and will begin to exceed him in performance at school.
	In one of its surveys, the OECD stated that the gap in this country between the highest performers and the lowest performers was greater and more closely correlated with social class than elsewhere. That is something that we must address. Those who come out of school with little to show for it face diminished lives and opportunities; fewer prospects for earning salaries; more risk of unemployment; and, according to the evidence, inferior health and shorter lives. What disadvantage. It is possibly right to say that, because they did not succeed in school as they grew up into parenthood, their children will be disadvantaged.
	In short, we are creating a self-perpetuating social structure that is an abomination. That is dangerous, it is waste, and it is immoral. It will also challenge the orderliness of our society, because the ability to get and hold a job, as we face the growing challenge from the East, will increasingly depend on having something to offer in the market-place. People who cannot offer or do not see an opportunity to do so will be dysfunctional members of society. The well-being of our society—from a social point of view, never mind an economic one—demands passionate attention to that issue.
	I am conscious that the Government have relevant policies. Sure Start; the extended school day; catch-up; junior apprenticeships; a broader curriculum post-14; and again and again a concern with every child—those are good policies. I see further evidence of commitment in the Government's target of increasing the proportion who leave primary school at 11 with decent reading standards from 75 to 85 per cent. Good. However, what about the other 15 per cent? When we set targets for our schools, is there not a worry that school teachers, heads or governors who want to meet them will naturally concentrate on the borderline cases who can help them reach the target of 85 per cent?
	We must motivate schools to serve every child. Value-added, a measure of performance of the whole class to go alongside the other statistics, is something that I was urging on the government 13 years ago and is now being introduced. It is a question not just of measures, however, but of what we do. I am conscious that one-to-one coaching, which some will need, is expensive, but the dividend for that young person's life and for society may be much greater than the cost.
	I have spoken before in the House about the crux point in a child's life, when he or she moves from primary to secondary school. They go from a small school, where he or she is a big guy and is well known by the class teacher, to a secondary school probably three times as big, where they are little guys; where, instead of the good shepherd teacher, they have a different teacher and a different room for each subject. If, in going into that big world, they cannot read or their arithmetic—I will not call it mathematics—is appalling, they will regress and will be increasingly dysfunctional members of that school by the time they get to year 9. Behavioural problems in schools are partly associated with that.
	The Minister has spoken or written about catch-up assistance for such kids when they get to secondary schools. Good. I would like to add a couple of other ideas, neither of them particularly original. If parents are willing, a child who is way behind and is relatively young in his year group should have the opportunity to stay an extra year in primary school to catch up before making that major migration. Alternatively, instead of such low performers having x number of teachers for different subjects, they could have a form teacher who knows them as individuals and teaches them as such, either for all the curriculum or, perhaps more sensibly, for subjects that do not require specialist equipment. That is nothing new. A school in the south of England is about to introduce it.
	I am suggesting not that those ideas should suddenly become policies but that the Government should be ready to encourage well worked-out initiatives from schools or local authorities that specifically address that issue. Where special help is being given to a child, it is reasonable to reach out to the parents and seek a compact with them in which they engage to take a proactive interest in the education of their child and to be kept informed about lessons and homework and where their child stands. They could even be encouraged to come into the school from time to time and learn with the child. Learning together develops a community of learning between them.
	I have noticed in the manifesto that the Government have it in mind to encourage small schools to help the most disadvantaged children. I understand the case for large comprehensive schools, given the range of curriculum that they can offer and the economies of scale. However, children who have had a bad start in life and are trailing might be lost in the vast numbers of such a school. Going to a smaller school, say of 600, is more than offset by the commitment of and the identification of the child with the teachers and the school. The department has not been well disposed towards that in the past, but they should do some new thinking.
	I will draw a quick personal analogy. When I was chairman of the Post Office, the post offices of the world suddenly found a great advantage in having vast sorting offices full of machinery. No one looked at the human loss, the loss of comradeship. We had huge industrial relations problems. The human side in learning and work matters immensely.
	We have referred again and again to behaviour. I have one thought. Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, said 12 years ago that,
	"Frontiers are defended by soldiers; civilisations are made in schools".
	We need to work a bit harder at making those civilisations. The subject of citizenship is a natural place for class members to engage the teacher in open discussion of the conditions precedent to, and the structure of, a school community that works, is effective and helps them all—a society in which the emphasis on "me" that has developed in our culture is instead on the Group and on my role as a neighbour to others.
	I know from the Minister's opening speech that he cares about those who come from a disadvantaged background. Those words he quoted from Lord Callaghan's speech about the state providing what a wise parent would want for his or her child—I cannot remember them exactly—are very apt. I hope that he will tackle the issue of the disadvantaged with passion.

Lord Pendry: My Lords, I begin with the alleged words of King Henry VIII to all his wives, "I will not detain you long". However, I do wish to welcome this debate, which relates to the weighty issues of health, education and social affairs. These are priority areas for any government, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to support the Government, who have retained their commitment to these vital policies throughout their first and second terms, and now their third historic term.
	There are of course great challenges ahead that result from this commitment, and I would like to bring to the fore one aspect that unites these policy strands, and yet is often forgotten in their debate: the development of sport and physical activity. The gracious Speech states that,
	"Education remains my Government's main priority",
	and that the Government will,
	"build on the progress already made to improve educational standards for all".
	Standards are already improving up and down the country, as we know, and with record investment in the form of the Building Schools for the Future programme, we can expect further progress in the years ahead.
	The Government are also addressing the need to improve sport provision in schools. I particularly welcome the commitment of £250 million a year for PE, School Sport and Club Links. As the House will be aware, the Government are working towards all schools, primary and secondary, being part of 400 school sports partnerships. Each partnership will be centred on a specialist sports college and will have approximately eight secondary and 40 to 50 primary schools. Currently, there are 350 specialist sports colleges and 311 school sports partnerships. By September 2006, all 400 will be in place and will be delivering tangible results.
	The national summit on physical education highlighted the potential which investment in quality programmes of physical education and sport can have on behaviour, attendance, retention and even academic achievement. That has since been replicated by a report from the Institute of Youth Sport at Loughborough University, which specifically illustrates the potential of school partnerships in,
	"Improving motivation, attitude and self esteem",
	among pupils. Indeed, there are also encouraging illustrations of the potential that sport has in encouraging educational interest from pupils. Sport provides role models for the young, and programmes such as the Premier League Reading Stars, in which footballer stars promote the virtues of reading to children, are a great illustration of the power that role models can have beyond the field of play.
	Sport does not detract from academic work but encourages, even forces, the participants to be highly driven, organised and efficient in pursuing long-term goals as well as short-term ones. I hope that noble Lords will join me to unite around the Government's aim to ensure that by 2010 all children will receive at least two hours high-quality PE or sport per week at school and further access to sport in the community.
	A number of noble Lords, not least the noble Lords, Lord Coe, Lord Moynihan, Lord Higgins, Lord Monro and Lord Glentoran, have all excelled in their respective sports. Alongside their own commitment and drive, they would not have been able to achieve those sporting heights without support and access to facilities, starting with their respective schools.
	Therefore, the PE, School Sport and Club Links is an important mechanism for this development and will help integrate schools and clubs into providing and extending participation by widening the scope of accessibility for young people. Through club links and promoting out-of-school activity, as well as the physical education curriculum and increased competitive school sport, this integration will develop sport, the emerging talent and encourage lifelong participation and activity.
	Increasing sports participation at school and in the community also has a tremendous opportunity to increase public health, particularly for those in deprived areas. Obesity costs the National Health Service at least £500 million per year, with additional direct and indirect economic costs of £2 billion per year. Research conducted by the National Centre for Social Research found that in 2001–02, 16.4 per cent of children aged two to 10, living in the most deprived areas were obese, compared with 11.2 per cent in the least deprived areas. With increased sporting access at school, children will have more opportunities to participate and in consequence improve their health, particularly in those deprived areas.
	Sports participation will be beneficial to the health of our children, but it will also have many positive benefits on the lives of everyone who participates, as well as having long-term advantages. The physical activity can reduce the chances of suffering from a range of health problems, as we know, which include heart problems and strokes.
	That leads me to a concern in sport which is not given the prominence that it deserves; namely, the issues facing women in sport. The Women's Sport Foundation has produced a report on female participation. Interestingly it highlights that,
	"exercise does not even register on the radar for many young mothers".
	That is reinforced by the General Household Survey 2002, which indicated that there was a drop in the number of women who participated in sport from 38 per cent in 1996 to 36 per cent in 2002. According to the Game Plan, published by the Cabinet Office in 2002, women are 19 per cent less likely to take part in physical activity than men. In my opinion, these are worrying trends and I would like to know what solutions the Government see to those declining figures. Perhaps the Minister might comment on that at the end of the debate or write to me on the subject.
	Both the Football Association and the Premier League are to be commended for their encouragement of women's football, which is the fastest growing women's sport in the country. The Government are right to pledge to work with the FA, the Premier League and the Football Foundation, to find ways of raising the standard and level of participation in community sport, particularly among women.
	As we consider the wider questions of social inclusion, I would like to draw noble Lords' attention to a project run by Loughborough University to foster relations with, among others, the Muslim population. This project, entitled Widening Access Through Sport, has set up a totally female environment for young girls, providing them with more opportunities and confidence to take into their studies. Even with such initiatives being tested and used, it is important that more measures should be considered or implemented to promote female participation in sport.
	For each of the areas that I have touched on, there is one common theme: sport is a good in its own right. It is also a tremendously powerful tool in ensuring that wider social aspirations are met, from education through to health and even social inclusion. The challenge is quite simple. In order to ensure that participation is high, and that we engender the benefits about which I have spoken briefly, it is essential that funding is made available to provide opportunities. That comes through new facilities, access to high-quality coaching and then getting the necessary structures in place to engage and retain community involvement.
	Your Lordships may know that I am the president of the Football Foundation, which the Government recognised in their manifesto as being the model from which to develop a national sports foundation. The Football Foundation and the Football Stadia Improvement Fund have invested over half a billion pounds in the past five years to create a new generation of community facilities and ground-breaking initiatives.
	Happily it is not football alone that is meeting the many challenges. I was privileged yesterday to be at the launch of a campaign to rejuvenate cricket in schools in England and Wales. The scheme is called a Chance to Shine, which seeks to raise £50 million from both public and private sectors. Its aim is to regenerate competitive cricket in the state schools by 2015.
	So, by way of conclusion, I reaffirm my support for the gracious Speech and look forward to the progress that can be made in this historic third consecutive term of a Labour Government.

Lord Patten: My Lords, I agree with almost everything that the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, has said. I listened to him with great attention. I also listened with great attention to the speech, full of intellectual zip, vim and analysis, of my noble friend Lord De Mauley. In a bipartisan way I have long regarded the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay, as my guru of choice on pension matters, but he will now have to look to his laurels with that crystal-clear analysis by my noble friend Lord De Mauley.
	In an equally bipartisan way, I extend the warmest congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis—that despite the fact that he spent many a happy year in the City of Oxford trying under various guises to unseat me from my then comfortable billet in electoral politics. These are matters to which I shall return over the years as things become more partisan, rather than following the noble Lord's maiden speech—that I promise him.
	It has become commonplace over the days of this debate to say that there is too much legislation around; that it is badly thought out and then ill-considered in another place. That has been said time and again and I say "Hear, hear" to that. The gracious Speech, like the whole collection of them since 1997, I think can be seen as one more example of the "thoughtless autopilot torrent of legislation" school of government that has throughout put spinning on a higher plane than thinking. Never can a Prime Minister have frittered away landslide victories to such little effect as has the right honourable gentleman the Prime Minister. He has been blown hither and thither by every passing wind of political fashion, every bit of focus-group feedback and every tabloid campaign that has kick-started the policy of the weak, whatever that has been.
	However, there is one issue in the gracious Speech that I welcome very much: there is no substantial legislation affecting either arts or culture, to which I intend to restrict my remarks. At least in this, his last hurrah, the Prime Minister has done no further damage in that respect. It is one area where government should manage a strategic retreat from legislation, targets, interference and so on while leaving behind a superstructure of support and encouraging a new in-rush of funds for the arts from private donors—what might be thought of as a private finance of culture initiative (PFCI). The state's dilemma in respect of support for the arts will always be with us: either it supports some fascist or communist official state culture, or it stands back and simply gives a bit of support to everything in sight. It is not a dilemma easily solved.
	There was once a halfway house, when the state, via the Reithian idea of the old BBC, tried to balance high culture and the realm of judgment against popular culture, and to help the two to meet at the margins. Broadly speaking, that consensus has gone and the state has been colonised by a much more egalitarian ethos, sometimes, alas, hostile to high achievement, high thought and high culture. It is hostile to the very idea that some people might know a bit more or have a bit more to say than others. That trend has been brilliantly analysed by Professor Roger Scruton, whose works I recommend to noble Lords.
	There is an iron rule that once government introduce subsidies they are captured, first, by bureaucrats, and, secondly, by producers. It might be an idea for the state, rather than labouring to have a few cultural policies, to promote cultivated people, whether composers or conceptual artists, in their ranks, within their own power structures. We see this Government as lacking the balance and drive to do that.
	One area where the arts should be appreciated is the honours system. I have no interest to declare in the arts. The celebrity system has colonised and taken over the honours system in the arts. People are all too often honoured by way of government endorsing a popular fascination with celebrities in the hope that electoral stardust will twinkle down from having given an MBE to the latest proponent of some ephemeral bit of artistic fame.
	As the tide for the present Prime Minister ebbs before our eyes and power begins to flow evermore vigorously towards his colleague Mr Brown, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer should reflect on the fact that he could also become the best arts Minister this country never had and save a great deal of public expenditure at the same time, without any legislation cluttering up his first Queen's Speech. He could do so by pre-empting the need for more public expenditure in what Budgets are left to him.
	He should remember that in his Scotland, which he rightly respects as much as south of the Border, cultural life in museums and galleries in the 19th century was stimulated by private patronage, not the state. Private patronage was intent on building temples of the arts or libraries that were open to all, indeed often with the specific purpose of promoting what is these days called access, but all without Ministers' intervention, policies and subsidies. We do not look enough to the private world to stimulate cultural life. Cultural life is stimulated by private patronage, and the much bigger tax breaks that Mr Brown could provide would encourage it even more. We do not have those tax breaks, but compare this country's system to the mechanisms in the United States, where there are many creative and well funded opera companies and symphony orchestras, for example, while their equivalents in the United Kingdom are constantly in crisis and on the verge of bankruptcy.
	Mr Brown might reflect on the lessons of history as he moves towards office, something that the present Prime Minister has never liked doing in this respect. He could quickly see that private patronage has historically been inherently favourable to supporting matters of permanent value—those museums or temples of culture—and encouraging 19th century workers to come to them. State patronage tends to lose itself in the ephemera of the kind that can be sold to the present and fleeting assemblies of fashion, the sort of world that has given us the Dome.
	However, we are where we are; we have state subsidy for the arts, although at huge bureaucratic cost. Under Labour, central bureaucracy in the arts has ballooned. DCMS running costs have doubled since 1997 and the Arts Council now costs £45 million a year just to run itself. Imagine what the arts world could do with that £45 million a year if they could get their hands on it to sustain an orchestra, promote theatre or acquire in museums.
	The Government's policy of putting bureaucrats before the arts should stop. I talked the other night to a distinguished and thoughtful administrator in one of our major museums—of no known political form to me, at least—who said that all the targets that the museum world now have are time-consuming and destructive to what a museum should do. For example, endless attention to access, which is of course important, means that substantial funds must flow from that particular museum's budget into the pockets of public opinion polling organisations which stand outside day after day checking on the exact percentage of C2s and Ds who come through the door. The great philanthropists of the past did not bother much with that; they simply built great buildings, which were stuffed full of great art, and in poured the C2s and Ds of the day. They flocked there free of charge. By comparison, that museum administrator told me, they are given no guidance, let alone set targets, on matters such as conservation, which cost money in the holdings of those museums.
	I welcome the thinking of my colleague in another place, Mr Hugo Swire. He has come up with the concept of a national acquisitions fund of at least £150 million, funded by increased National Lottery resources available for arts and heritage plus the savings on bureaucracy. The arts need just that kind of light-touch approach; they certainly do not need new legislation. That is why I welcome that aspect of the gracious Speech. They certainly do not need quangos or increasing armies of civil servants, let alone the strangulation of ever-tighter targetry.
	Having addressed my remarks more to Mr Brown than to Mr Blair, I end with something for Mr Brown's new broom to attend to when he assumes office as well as power. I think that when the right honourable gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer assumes power, he will present himself to the electorate as a simon-pure and crony-free zone; as someone against sleaze, ephemera, fads and, above all, spin, in favour of serious, long-term, well thought through legislation and policies.
	I must warn my colleagues on the Front Bench that that will be something that we must watch out for: this new new Labour that will appear within about the next 18 months. But it will also give Mr Blair much to think about in the years in future—much to ponder, perhaps, when tapping into some site called "flatmates reunited", sending messages through the ether: "Where did we go wrong? Why did we not achieve more with our three substantial victories?" The answer is very simple: by and large, they preferred and continue to prefer spinning to thinking.

The Earl of Listowel: My Lords, I also express my deepest respect for the work that the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, undertook in his previous role and warmly welcome the Minister to his new post.
	I also express my admiration for the work of the noble Lord, Lord Pendry. Mothers of boys who are growing up without fathers in the family, especially, have been saying to me how important football is in keeping their boys on the straight and narrow and of the importance of football coaches and the relationship and role modelling that they can offer those boys.
	Respect for adults; due deference to adults; and due respect for the experience of adults, must flow from and be associated with due respect and consideration by adults to the needs of children. To my mind, most importantly, adults need to pay due respect to the attachments and relationships of children to their siblings, their friends and their parents. Most importantly, all children growing up with no parent involved in their lives need one person, over the years, to whom they can turn for advice who is always there for them.
	I was very pleased to hear my noble friend Lord Dearing emphasise the need for smaller schools for some children so that they can relate to a teacher and not feel lost in some factory environment. I note what the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, said about the importance of parents having time to spend with their children. We need to think carefully about early-years children—infants—spending long periods of time in nursery provision. Obviously, that is necessary, but we need to think carefully about how that is performed, especially in the light of the latest research. Looked-after children, children in local authority care, call for one person to whom they can turn when they are in the care system and when they leave. They term that person a big friendly giant, after the book by Roald Dahl—someone who is consistently there for them over time.
	At the start of this new parliamentary Session, this is a time to look back at what has been achieved. I recently visited The Haven in Hammersmith and Fulham, a respite project for families with children with disabilities—severe learning or physical disabilities. Prior to the Care Standards Act, it was housed in a two-storey terraced house. It was cramped. Following the Act, the local authority was obliged to find new premises. It renovated a nursery and it is now set with a large garden on one level. Children who need space for a while can go into the gardens and spend time there. They can return to the premises and visit whomever they please. It has made an immense difference to the children. Parents see the work when they visit and are astounded by what can be achieved with their children that they can never do at home.
	Having spoken with children's homes managers, they have welcomed the innovation of the Commission for Social Care Inspection, which flowed from the Care Standards Act, and the minimum standards for children's homes. I cite the example of a children's home manager, Philip Craig, at the Dalling Road children's home in Hammersmith and Fulham. He now has much more influence on the intake of children into his children's home, so he can ensure that there is a better environment for all those children and that there is a right balance of children with different needs. He also has more influence over where those children are placed when they move on. Transitions are better. That is extremely important for those children.
	So good legislation has achieved improved outcomes for vulnerable children. That is just one example of that. The Commission for Social Care Inspection is shortly to be merged with another inspectorate. That may be necessary, but we must reflect on the danger of too much legislation, too much change and not allowing good legislation to be bedded down in full implementation of policy. The noble Baroness, Lady Jay, mentioned that.
	When I think of respect, I think of the words of King Lear:
	"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child".
	I think how, at the end of the play, he recognises that, to a large extent, it is his own folly that has led to his poor treatment by two of his children. In the very opening scene of the play, the Duke of Gloucester, in the presence of his son Edmund, says to Kent,
	"there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged".
	I think that that is Shakespeare signalling that when parents cease to respect children and their needs, chaos can arise in the kingdom.
	Her Majesty's Government have taken important steps in improving outcomes for vulnerable children, but there are still more than 100,000 families in temporary accommodation. Each year, increasing numbers of children are taken into care. The educational attainment of children in care is still very much below what it should and could be. Barnardo's recently reminded some of us that the parents of 200,000 to 300,000 children are using drugs and there are perhaps 1 million children of whom one parent or the other has a serious problem with alcohol.
	There is a great deal further to go and I welcome the fact that, as I understand it, in the education Bill announced in the Queen's Speech, a new statutory duty will be placed on local authorities to make youth provision. That has been a neglected area. It is perhaps symbolic that we have been concerned about anti-social behaviour of children—since 1997, a great deal has been made of it—but only now are we introducing a statutory duty on local authorities to make the youth provision that would be so constructive in helping to engage young people and bring them into society to help them to contribute. When the noble Lord, Lord Warner, replies, perhaps he will confirm that indeed a statutory duty will be placed on local authorities and when we can expect the long-awaited Green Paper on youth.
	On implementation, Margaret Hodge constantly reiterated the need for professionals to come out of their silos to work together. That is an important aspect of the Children Act 2004: working in partnership to improve outcomes for children. However, two recent Select Committee reports, including the other House's DfES report on the Every Child Matters agenda, summarises by stating that the youth justice system is not effectively working with the other agencies to achieve better outcomes for children. The Home Affairs Select Committee of the other House states that other agencies are not working effectively with the youth justice system to achieve their aims.
	So there is a great deal of work to do and a need for cultural change. Perhaps one good example of that is the government policy to encourage the publication of the details of children with anti-social behaviour orders. The Home Office has conducted no research into the impact of such publicity on those children, their siblings or families. If I were a youth worker or a social worker and the basis of my ethos was to safeguard children, I would have great difficulty in working in an organisation which, in this aspect, shows so little regard for the welfare of troubling, but also often troubled, children.
	In conclusion, I look forward to the Government's work on the childcare workforce, including social workers, early-years educators and foster carers, who are fundamental to it. Last week I visited a local authority secure unit where some of the children had had 44 placements before arriving there. If outcomes for children are to be improved, we must engage in this agenda. I look forward to the business of the Government and hope that we can implement fully the important achievements that the Government have already made for children.

Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay: My Lords, the whole House will have been moved by the obvious sincerity and compassion with which the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, speaks. I welcome my old friend the new noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to our House. He has a distinguished record as an academic and author. The titles of his books have a strangely prophetic ring. A Class Act was written in 1997, and he is certainly that. I enjoyed reading there that he is one of the few of us who are avid readers of that splendid publication Liberal Democrat News. If, by any chance, his subscription has run out, I will be delighted to renew it for him.
	Then we had Making Aristocracy Work: The Peerage and the Political System in Britain in 1993. The noble Lord certainly got into training for this place early. I hope that he will not have to write a second edition of his acclaimed 1994 work from first-hand experience. The title was Failure in British Government.
	The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, will also find that this is a good place to buttonhole people whom he needs to interview for his biography of Roy Jenkins. When he first told me that he was writing it, he said, "It's all right, Matthew. I will not interview you for a year or two because I want to get around the people who will die first". I hope that the noble Lord is in no hurry for our interview.
	There has been a lot of public talk about it, but it must be right to have the noble Lord here as Minister, defending the Government's policy from the Front Bench and giving Parliament the chance to scrutinise, question and, if necessary, oppose it. That is far better for democracy than for policy to be made by advisers in the shadow of a Prime Minister with too much personal power in our overcentralised system.
	It is all change on the work and pensions front, not just in the Commons where David Blunkett is our fifth Secretary of State since 1997. We have even broken the Department for Education record of four Secretaries of State. Would we want to send our children to a school where the head had changed four times in the past eight years? We wish David Blunkett well, although we will miss Alan Johnson and Malcolm Wicks, who showed signs of genuinely open minds on the pensions crisis and were taking our proposal for a citizen's pension seriously.
	In this House, I will miss both of my opposite numbers who have left their Front Bench. We got to know each other fairly well during our marathon sessions on the Pensions Bill, but the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, whom I am delighted to see in her place, and the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, go back much further than that in their long and distinguished records of service. The "Patricia and Terence show"—if I can call it that—played for eight years here to a discerning and appreciative House. They are invariably courteous and dauntingly well informed. Neither misses a trick in debate. Shadowing them has been a very steep learning curve. I am delighted that the noble Baroness is staying in the thick of the action when she speaks next in this debate.
	I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, to his new role and another old friend as a new Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and I sat as Oxford city councillors together for three years. I do not remember ever disagreeing with him in that time, which I hope is a good omen for constructive dialogue 30 years on.
	Consensus is the new buzz word on pensions. We have heard it already today. The Government say that they seek it. Adair Turner is virtually consensus personified. He is a former Conservative; we were most impressed with his contribution on the economic policy committee of the SDP; and he is clearly now trusted by new Labour.
	The first report of his commission was a masterly and comprehensive analysis of the scale of Britain's long-term pension problem. He pointed clearly to the inconsistencies and inadequacies of our present pension system. The way in which he outlined the stark choices that we face as a result of rapid increases in longevity encouraged us on these Benches to believe that he would recommend root and branch reforms in our state pension system, in particular in his final report this autumn. We live in hope that he still will.
	Some 87 per cent of men but only 13 per cent of women in this country are entitled to a full state pension on the basis of their own national insurance contribution record, which is often because of time spent bringing up children or caring for elderly or disabled relatives. On present government policies and projections, 60 per cent of pensioners will end up on means-tested benefits. Those chilling facts make an unanswerable case for us, for many thoughtful Labour people and for leading outside organisations, such as the National Association of Pension Funds and the Pensions Policy Institute, in favour of a non-means-tested citizen's pension that would be payable as of right and rising in line with national average earnings.
	Turner rightly describes our pension system as the most complex in the world and the present UK state pension system as one of the least generous in the developed world. But analysis is simpler than prescription. My colleagues, Steve Webb and David Laws, and I welcome the private meetings that we have with Adair Turner to exchange and test our respective ideas. However, I wonder whether he is well advised at the moment in the very public way in which he seems to be almost trying to engage in pre-emptive consensus building—if I can call it that—around a report that has not yet been published or finalised, particularly as David Blunkett is only weeks into his job and the Government's own view—understandably—is still in a state of flux.
	Adair Turner and his commission have a unique opportunity to get their heads down and produce an intellectually challenging and coherent report. If they make the case for their chosen reforms compelling enough, the time is right for all three main parties and the pensions world to come together and find substantial common ground. But the report will lose its impact if it is watered down in the hope of meeting less political resistance or because of funding fears.
	At a very interesting seminar organised by the Pensions Policy Institute yesterday—at which I was very pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Hunt—the Labour MP, John Denham, drew a very telling contrast between the National Health Service, which people are prepared to see properly funded from general taxation because they trust it and believe that it delivers for them, and pensions, which people broadly do not trust and do not believe work for them at present.
	A key question, as the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, in his thoughtful and well argued maiden speech pointed out, will obviously be whether we should compel people to save for a pension over and above the inevitable element of compulsion involved in national insurance contributions, which are, let us be frank, just another form of general taxation to pay for the state pension.
	Our view is simple. If there is a non-means-tested state pension for all, which is set at a level on which people can live, further compulsion is unnecessary. By all means encourage people to join workplace pension schemes, educate and inform them and make low-cost, reliable, safe pension saving products available through National Savings & Investments. But should there be compulsion beyond paying for the citizen's pension for all? No. If we stick with our present system of mass means-testing of state pension benefits, compelling middle and lower income people to save for an extra pension is wrong. It is not in their interests and could in many cases be tantamount to pension mis-selling. The key to improving incentives for private saving is a non-means-tested state pension, so that people know that they will keep every pound that they save.
	David Blunkett has said that welfare payments—he may not have been talking about pensions, but it is a good analogy—should be not a safety net but a trampoline or an escalator. As far as pensioners are concerned, they do not want a trampoline. They need a much stronger safety net from the state with far fewer holes in it for them to fall through.
	There will obviously be no early pensions Bill in the House. The ink is hardly dry on the last one. The warnings that we gave about the financial strains on the Pension Protection Fund and the inadequacy of the £20 million a year financial assistance scheme are sadly proving only too justified. Major pension funds such as MG Rover, Allders and Courts are queuing up to knock on the PPF's door before they have paid a penny of insurance premiums into the fund. But I pay tribute to the vigorous and businesslike way in which David Norgrove, the new Pensions Regulator, and Lawrence Churchill and Myra Kinghorn at the Pension Protection Fund have started their work.
	We look forward to seeing the details of the PPF risk-based levies soon, so that well funded pension schemes, backed by responsible employers, are not penalised by having to subsidise those who play fast and loose with their pension responsibilities. With every day that passes, we see more evidence of companies that are doing that—not least in the venture capital-backed sector.
	We will see Bills on housing and incapacity benefit in this Session. We welcome the practical and constructive tone struck by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and by DWP Ministers so far. As long as that approach continues, with no deviation towards knee-jerk populism, we will support the Government in their efforts to give timely, targeted help to get people off benefit and into work. In the regional pattern of invalidity benefit claims, there is a strong correlation between buoyant local labour markets offering a good range of jobs and low numbers on incapacity benefit. Work is good for people, if it is in the right place and is tailored to their needs, but people who cannot work must be properly protected, not badgered or targeted.
	We look forward to a busy Session on work and pensions and to this House giving freely of its time and expertise—both of which are, I am sorry to say, in short supply in the Commons sometimes—as we improve the Bills that come before us.

Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, I, too, congratulate the maiden speakers; their speeches were immaculate, interesting, challenging and entertaining—and to be all of those is a considerable triumph. So congratulations, indeed. On a personal note, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, for his remarks today and the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, for his the day before yesterday, which I have appreciated.
	Consensus seems to be breaking out because I, too, shall talk about pensions—women's pensions. Many of us will remember that graffiti of the 1960s and its TV resonances: "Do not adjust your vision, there is a fault in reality". Comments have been made this weekend about Adair Turner. He talked about pensions, graduates, workers and savers. One word that I did not pick up in any of his press releases was "women". Yet two-thirds of all pensioners are women. We need to adjust our vision to respect reality—to see the world as it is, not as Beveridge left it 60 years ago. Pensioners are women and pensions are for women, but for far too long, pensions policy has been designed for men.
	We shall assume for pension purposes the life narrative of Joe. We will rightly—as the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, and other maiden speakers said—urge him to work longer and save harder. Joe may not like it but, subject to his health, he can probably do that, working 40 or so hours a week for 40 or so years. But if Joe is Joanne, as most pensioners are and will be, she can do neither. She can neither save nor work harder.
	Why not? There are a few reasons. First, pensions are attached to the labour market. Women work for fewer hours, for fewer years and for lower pay. They still have only three-quarters or so of the full-time earnings of men, half their income and a third or less of their pension. The average, median, pensioner couple has an income of £250 per week. His share is £184 and hers is £66.
	That is due to women's caring responsibilities for children and then for elderly parents. A quarter of all women between 45 and 64 are carers and a quarter of those simultaneously are caring for their own dependent children. Any job that a woman holds must fit around her caring responsibilities. So, she works part time, often below the NI qualifying level—as do nearly half of all working women—doing what we as a society want her to do, putting her family first in a manner that is decent. Then we punish her for that, for doing what we and she believe is right.
	That is compounded by the fact that we are all living longer. She will remain a part-time, rather than a full-time, worker for longer, because her parents are living longer by a month or two a year and a year or two a decade. In turn, she is their carer. But her pension, which has been reduced by caring for them, also must sustain her own increased life expectancy. A quarter of all women will now live to 93. Yet half of all women over 65 are single, mostly widowed and the longer they live, the poorer they become.
	The other reason why women cannot save is family structure. Most wives—and most policy makers from Beveridge and after—expect the husband to provide the pension for the two of them; hence the couple's basic state pension, with its 60 per cent addition for the dependent wife. Yet, the marriage rate is falling—in 1976 it was 400,000, but in 2001 it was 286,000. Half of current marriages end in divorce. In the next 15 years, nearly 40 per cent of all women between 55 and 64 will not be married and, therefore, not protected by a husband's pension, as in the past.
	Even when they remain married and the husband annuitises his increasing money purchase pot, it almost always relies on a single-life level annuity and it dies with him. She is left with no occupational pension. If she has been a lone parent, divorced or a co-habitee, she has no rights to his basic state pension. As the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, said, the consequence is that over 92 per cent of men retire with a full basic state pension in their own right. Only 13 per cent of women do that. Caring for children, caring for the elderly, the breakdown of marriage and conventional family forms produce a triple hit for women's pension rights.
	So, whereas men's pension problems, which are real and will be examined by Adair Turner, hinge on the adequacy and security of their private pensions, that would be a nice problem for women to have. Their problem is the lack of a decent state pension in their own right. They have a faux de mieux reliance on amenable husbands, if they have them, or on means-tested benefits if they draw them.
	What message can we draw from this? We need to read women's lives as a narrative—as parents, as workers, as carers and as pensioners. Whatever happens to Joe's private life, whether he marries, has children or divorces, that, apart from making him miserable, will not affect his work and pension. Whereas, almost every similar change in Joanne's life would give her a pension hit.
	I am proud that we have, as a government, developed structural connections between women as parents and women as workers. There are maternity rights, flexible working, child care tax credits and so on. We have helped women back into the labour market with the New Deal, the minimum wage and tax credits to ensure that work pays—a lone parent who earns £5 an hour will take home £12 an hour. Therefore, for the first time, a woman is paid a man's rate.
	But the more that we encourage labour flexibility to help women as parents, the more we damage their capacity as workers to build their own pensions later in life. The more that we expect and hope that middle-aged women will act as carers for their parents and their elders, the more likely it is that they will have no one to care for them in their old age. Nearly a half of all women will not be receiving a share of a couple's pension because they are not married, yet, due to their caring responsibilities, their part-time work and their low earnings, it will be difficult for them to build up their own pension. We encourage women to make decent choices that we as a society want—and then we punish them for it.
	What are the conclusions? There is no way to weigh, compare or contrast women's waged work and their equally valuable unwaged work—their childcare and their elderly care. Yet only waged work counts towards their pensions. So what are our options?
	We have three options. I am convinced, on the first of the options, that we cannot continue to tweak the national insurance system and the basic state pension through more and more credits to bring more women in. That is primarily because the complexity of caring arrangements does not lend itself to a formula that you can encompass by national insurance credit. I have tried to do that, and I cannot. If you care for one person on middle-rate DLA for 35 hours, you get national insurance; but what happens if it is two people for 20 hours each or two people with fluctuating hours of between 15 and 25 hours? How can you audit-trap those people to get them into the national insurance system? You cannot—it is not possible. It is already the case that the national insurance system is a patchwork of credits and contributions. Already only 60 per cent of national insurance years are actually paid for, yet we continue with the increasingly mythical notion of a contributory basic state pension.
	Secondly, we can make it an issue of poverty rather than gender fairness, and extend income-related benefits, except that perhaps only 75 per cent of elderly people claim their benefits. I applaud the pension credit system for uniquely attacking the problem of poverty that elderly women experienced until the past few years. That has been wonderful. But the more generous means-tested or income-related benefits such as pension credit become, the harder it is to build a large enough pension to float you off them altogether. The noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, was right in saying that modest saving becomes perceived to be less worth it. And in any case, employers have told me that they will not press on a middle-aged low-earning woman a pension proposal, for fear that the gains will be incomplete and they risk mis-selling. Pensions are sold in the market by employers—they are not bought by women at home from salesmen. If employers are not committed to pensions for their women employees, the women will go unpensioned.
	There is a third option, which is the one that I favour, which is to develop a universal basic state pension for all citizens. I believe that the basic national insurance state pension was designed for husbands in 40-year jobs and wives in 40-year marriages, and that is the world that we have lost. I am not now arguing about its level—whether it should be £82 as now for a basic state pension or £109 for the pension credit level. I am arguing about its inclusivity on grounds of fairness. I am not arguing about its cost, which could range from £3 billion to double that in 2050, according to the precise assumptions that you make, nor about the exact nature of citizenship and residency. We can sort all that out; they are to a degree second-order issues.
	The significant point, and the principle that I am stating, is that only a universal basic state pension is sufficiently broad-brush to encompass the changing situation of the world that we face—a platform of provision for all of us to build on. I am arguing that principle. A universal basic state pension would protect all women irrespective of their marital status. It would protect the poorest, because they would not be relying on imperfectly claimed income-related benefits. There would be no losers at all, because married couples would each have their own state pension—a gain of some £40 a week. Indeed, a married couple with two full basic state pensions would float off pension credit altogether. Cohabitees, lone parents, civil partners and all other forms of family would also gain. Individuals and not certain specified relationships would carry pension rights. It would allow people, especially women, to make decent choices about work-life balance, caring and earning, without taking a pension hit. It would encourage saving, be fair, simple and transparent and address poverty.
	I believe that that is a proposal whose time has come and which has widespread support both in and outside Parliament, and I hope that tonight it will also gain the support in principle of my noble friend who is winding up tonight's debate, as far as he can go.

Lord Blackwell: My Lords, in addition to welcoming the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, I join my noble friend Lady Buscombe in giving a guarded welcome to the objectives set out in the gracious Speech as they relate to education and health. In particular, I welcome the direction of reform that the proposals represent, which is a clear shift in direction from the more centralist approach taken by the Government in their first term towards one that represents more emphasis on delegation and decentralisation. But it is a guarded welcome because we all know that it is results that count—and my concern is that the Government will not in the end go far or fast enough.
	Nevertheless, given the policies of competition and choice that I have advocated in previous debates in this House, I cannot but welcome moves to extend delegation and decentralisation to schools, doctors and hospitals. We have spoken about consensus on pensions, and I believe that this is evidence of a growing cross-party understanding of the need for a new settlement in public services, and I encourage the Government to be bolder in pursuing that. The nature of the new settlement is a common recognition that health and education, while primarily funded by the state as a service available to all, do not need to be run by the state. What is important is the quality of services received by the individual user, not who is involved in providing them or who they are employed by.
	As the Labour Party manifesto stated:
	"Expansion in NHS capacity will come both from within the NHS . . . as well as from the independent and voluntary sector".
	The manifesto continued:
	"Whenever NHS patients need new capacity for their healthcare we will ensure that it is provided from whatever source".
	Similarly, on education, the Labour Party manifesto said:
	"Britain has a positive tradition of independent providers within the state system . . . where new educational providers can help boost standards and opportunities in a locality we will welcome them into the state system, subject to parental demand, fair funding and fair admission".
	If we take the next logical step from those principles and if, as a nation, we recognise that providers of health and education do not need to be owned and controlled by the state, we may also be quite close to recognising that in general there may be advantages if they are not owned and controlled by the state. The truth is, as we have learned from nationalised industries, that public industries run by the state tend not to put the public or customer first but instead get bound up in their own inward-looking systems and targets. Management spends too much of its time looking upwards towards Whitehall, with too little time and freedom to pursue local entrepreneurial initiatives to satisfy real customer needs.
	We transformed telecommunications in this country by taking it out of state ownership, and I encourage the Government to have the courage of their own convictions by accepting that, ultimately, the same would be true of much of health and education provision within the right regulatory and funding framework. Rather than bureaucratic state control, we should move towards open contention between independent providers to deliver the best quality of service to patients and parents within a state-funded system. Patient and parent choice becomes the source of pressure for standards and efficiency, rather than Whitehall targets.
	I confess that I could not put it better than the Labour Party manifesto, which said on health:
	"The key principle is putting patients centre stage—and extending patient power and choice is crucial to achieving this".
	The manifesto went on to say:
	"We shall continue to encourage innovation and reform through the use of the independent sector to add capacity to and drive contestability within the NHS".
	The manifesto set out a target: that by,
	"the end of 2008, patients whose GPs refer them for an operation will be able to choose from any hospital"—
	any hospital—
	"that can provide that operation to NHS medical and financial standards".
	Let me add two more manifesto quotes while I am at it. The first says:
	"We will give patients and local GPs the right to choose the hospital or care provider that is right for them".
	The second says:
	"Schools will be liberated to set their own priorities and budgets, and money will follow the pupil".
	Those last two quotes are, as it happens, from the Conservative Party manifesto.
	So there we have a vision to which perhaps we can all subscribe—of a publicly funded health service and education system, open and free to all, served by innovative and independent hospitals, GP practices and schools, which compete openly to drive up standards and to attract patients and parents by the quality that they offer.
	Since, like the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and others in this House, I believe passionately that education is, and should be, the ladder of opportunity for everyone in society who wants to strive and rise, I believe strongly in creating that kind of education system where the opportunity to choose quality is open to all and not only to those who can afford to pay, just as the choice of quality healthcare should be open to all and not only to the wealthy. That is why the kind of reforms towards more competition and independent provision in health and education that I and others have been advocating is so important.
	If we are agreed on the end point, the real question is how far the Government's proposals in this gracious Speech will go towards achieving that level of reform. How far and how fast will they move towards that vision? While I recognise that we will have to be patient before we know the detail and that White Papers may precede primary legislation, perhaps I may set out a few of the issues that it will be important to address, whether in the Minister's winding-up speech today or in the further proposals from the Government when they are published. It is in the context of these issues that the proposals should then be judged.
	I turn first to health. Will the Government's further steps to free up foundation hospitals mean that local professionals really will have the opportunity to deliver innovative local treatment without the current constraints and overly burdensome central targets? When the Government talk about more choice and diversity in healthcare provision, will they establish conditions where, increasingly, independent foundation hospitals, alongside other new independent healthcare providers, can truly compete for patients and funding on a level playing field?
	Will the decision on what hospital facilities are provided in an area, including the use of cottage hospitals, be in the hands of local medical staff and local communities? What process will there be in that environment to deal with hospitals that fail to sustain patient demand?
	How will the Government take forward freedoms and funding for the primary care sector to offer real choice to patients while driving efficiency across the whole treatment chain? Will they, for example, seek to develop PCTs into an HMO-style healthcare provider or revert to a model that is closer to GP fund-holding? Many important issues around a proper structure for primary healthcare in particular still need to be resolved.
	And similar issues need to be addressed in education. Will the development of foundation schools really enable the state sector to transform itself into independent, state-funded schools, where head teachers and governors can offer parents a choice of education without excessive interference? Will this lead to the removal of local authority control over schools, with funding for pupils passing straight to schools based on pupil roles so that they can be truly independent?
	Will there be real support for the development of new independent state-funded schools? Will the new education providers, which the Government have promoted, be free to enter the system without the regulatory barriers and delays that make that freedom seem like lip service only? Will both foundation and new independent schools be allowed to expand in response to demand or to take over other schools where they have the support of parents?
	These are difficult issues, but they will determine whether the proposals that have been put forward to increase choice, competition and independence in both health and education transform the system in the way that the Government set out in their manifesto. If the Government bring forward proposals that move us towards the common vision that I have described, they will deserve support, but I and others will want to hold them to the bold ambitions that they have set out. I look forward to seeing the detailed proposals when they bring them forward so that we can debate them against that test.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff: My Lords, I add my sincere congratulations to the noble Lords, Lord Adonis and Lord De Mauley, on their most interesting maiden speeches, and I add my welcome to that of others to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in his very important post.
	I declare interests as a practising palliative care physician and President of ASH in Wales. I shall confine my comments on the Queen's Speech to health issues relating to alcohol and infection and to those which concern Wales.
	Before I do so, I must comment on the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Jay. I too had the honour to sit on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill committee, but I do not wish to pre-empt the take note debate on the committee's report. I hope that every noble Lord will read all three volumes of that report carefully before considering altering the law on intentional killing.
	I expected to be reassured by that committee's visits and evidence-taking, but I was not. The numbers are not small. One in 38 deaths in Holland is from euthanasia. That proportion rises to one in 32 if one takes into account illegally assisted deaths. That would translate to about 13,000 to 15,000 deaths per annum for our population size. An option in therapy actively to end the patient's life crosses a Rubicon. But consistent comments have been made in government reports on the shortage of palliative care. This Government promised to increase support to palliative care services in their manifesto. There are inequities in palliative care provision. Despite our knowledge, the skills that are potentially available in this country and the research findings that have transformed pain and symptom control, many patients are unable to access even palliative care, especially out of hours when they are at home.
	I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, whom I warmly congratulate on his promotion, will go even further than his party's manifesto to ensure that all patients in the closing months of their lives have everything done to enhance their quality of life, rather than their feeling a burden, abandoned and suffering through lack of care. We know how to do it, yet so many patients still never access the care that they deserve in our society. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, so clearly pointed out to us, much responsibility falls on women to care for dependants in the family at all stages of life, not just early on in childhood.
	It was heartening to hear that police and local communities will have increased powers to tackle guns, knives and alcohol-related violence. Alcohol-related violence is a huge problem. NHS staff are often on the receiving end in more senses than one. Much of this violence results in injuries, sustained in pubs and clubs from glasses and bottles. Glass injury usually affects the face, causing pain, suffering and long-term deformity, and it predominantly involves young adults. Even the compensation bill to the country, quite apart from the cost of caring and policing, is enormous. The average bill is more than £2,000 per ward.
	The NHS is a statutory partner in crime and disorder reduction partnerships, yet it cannot make direct representation to licensing authorities under the Licensing Act 2003. I hope that this anomaly will be rectified when we come look at the next piece of legislation.
	Sadly, alcohol remains a factor also in many road fatalities, particularly at night. It must be considered as part of any strategy to reduce casualties on the road. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents has told me that, in 2002, 560 people were killed by drunk drivers. That is the highest number since 1996. From a total of 19,010 casualties of alcohol-related accidents, 2,500 were seriously injured. As with assaults, those under 30 are more likely to be the driver in drink-drive incidents.
	Cycling has to become safer too, with proper traffic-free routes and much more driver awareness of cyclists. In 2003, 114 pedal cyclists died on our roads and 2,297 were seriously injured. The toll of accidents and its relationship to alcohol cannot be ignored.
	What then happens when the sick and injured end up in our NHS hospitals? Much publicity has surrounded dirty hospitals, but perhaps not enough has been said about the state of some of the visitors, who bring in MRSA and other bugs, do not wash their hands and show a flagrant disregard for hygiene. We need to look at hygiene, particularly hand-washing, as a whole public health concern. Staff in hospitals eat and live outside the hospital. They pick up infections such as Norwalk virus at a take-away meal, they come into work and then their symptoms appear. They are taken ill at work, so the community-acquired infection is brought into the hospital. Just to blame the NHS and the trust chief executive is not always appropriate.
	Surveillance systems document and do not fix the problem yet the sources of infection are actually often not being monitored in the community where the root causes lie. We are breeding out antibiotic resistance by the inappropriate use of antibiotics and unrealistic expectations of medicines. Antibiotics are incredibly valuable and this valuable resource is precious. I fear that in the next major epidemic when we really need our antibiotics there will be too much antibiotic resistance to cope and we will be faced with massive mortality.
	We must also ensure that the public themselves understand risk. This often cannot be easily quantified. The public need to understand that the unpredictable can happen, however careful staff are in the NHS. It does not always imply negligence. Those negligently harmed, whether in primary or secondary care, must be entitled to compensation, but the current bill for compensation is already huge. In 2003–04, such claims cost the NHS more than £400 million for the hospital sector alone. The NHS Litigation Authority estimates its total liabilities to be nearing £8 billion now.
	As the NHS is bled by compensation claims, we are not providing adequate care for the most vulnerable in our society—those with chronic advanced disease who are struggling to stay in their own homes and who need care at nights, weekends and bank holidays.
	I briefly turn my attention to Wales but I do not expect a response from the Minister today—that would be asking too much. A White Paper will be published to extend the powers of the National Assembly for Wales. I hope that there will be consideration of separating the parliament from the executive, of creating full proportional representation in the Assembly and that the committees will be changed so that they can scrutinise Ministers more effectively.
	I also propose that serious consideration be given to a Standing Committee of Welsh MPs and Peers, working closely with the Assembly, who could scrutinise legislation concerning Wales and ensure that incompatibilities with England do not emerge. Time on the Floor of both Houses would be saved and requests for legislation could be dealt with rather than remaining restricted to a very small quota coming forward each parliament, which leaves Wales frustrated by being denied the legislation it needs.
	That brings me to my last point. As noble Lords know, I have being trying to ensure that the Wales Assembly Government have the powers they want to prohibit smoking in public places and workplaces in Wales. As we speak the Assembly is debating the report from its own consultative processes. I believe that I have a message waiting for me when I finish speaking to tell me the outcome of that debate. I am sorry that I cannot give it to noble Lords now. Wales is ready to act. Please do not hold up health in Wales while we wait for England to play catch-up, and for England to decide what it wants to do.

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe: My Lords, I would like to concentrate my remarks on higher education and in doing so declare my interest as chief executive of Universities UK. I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, on an excellent maiden speech. I add my warmest good wishes and welcome to my noble friend the Minister. I very much enjoyed working with him in his former capacity and can attest to his formidable grasp of issues right across the whole of the education sector. I look forward to what I know will be his enormous contribution to the work of this House.
	In some respects it is a relief to see that higher education does not occupy the same high profile in the legislative programme as it has in previous Sessions. However, I must remind the House and the Government that they must not make the mistake of thinking that somehow we have "done" higher education.
	First, there are a number of pieces of legislation that will have a considerable impact on our universities. The Charities Bill will return to this House, having failed to complete its passage through Parliament in the previous Session. While the Bill preserves the exempt charitable status enjoyed by many universities, such institutions will be regulated in their roles as charities by the Higher Education Funding Council in lieu of the Charity Commission. I think that is the right approach to ensure that public trust in charities can be maintained with the minimum bureaucratic burden. I would like to pay particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, who has once again been active on behalf of universities to ensure that this Bill emerges in the best possible shape.
	I welcome the Government's emphasis on the reduction of regulation, epitomised by the inclusion in the Queen's Speech of a Regulatory Reform Bill. I look forward to seeing the details of that legislation, but I hope that it will deliver real improvements for universities as well as for business and industry.
	While I feel positive about the two Bills I have just described, I feel less happy about the Immigration and Asylum Bill. While I am sure that there are many measures in that legislation which are fair and necessary and which I will be able to support, I am deeply unhappy about the Government's plans to remove the right of appeal for prospective international students who have been refused visas.
	There has been quite some debate in this House already of recent measures to increase fees for international student visas, and charges for visa extensions. Vice-chancellors tell me that there is no doubt that these measures are affecting the attractiveness of the UK as a study destination.
	I do not wish to detain the House now with a lengthy discussion of the rights and wrongs of this case. I am sure it is a matter to which we will return. However, I will say this: Ministers know how valuable international students are to the United Kingdom. We depend in many ways on the best and brightest students from around the world who choose to study here.
	This is particularly true at postgraduate level and in science, engineering and technology. Brilliant students from all over the world come to our country and contribute something priceless to the intellectual culture of our universities and to our national life. The Government clearly recognise this because there are many policies, including the Prime Minister's initiative, which are aimed at attracting and retaining such students.
	What the Home Office proposes to do is, in my view, directly counter-productive. Coming so soon after a 60 per cent increase in the charge for a visa extension application by post, a 100 per cent increase in the charge for an application in person, and a proposed 136 per cent increase in the charge for an initial visa, the measures included in the Immigration and Asylum Bill to remove the right of appeal for international students will send a direct, and in my view very unfortunate, message to the best and the brightest from around the world. I hope that the Government will be persuaded to reconsider.
	Looking beyond the programme of legislation, there are some other major issues this House will almost certainly debate over the coming months. As always, funding will be foremost on the agenda as we embark on another spending review cycle.
	I hope that the Government will renew their existing commitment to maintain public investment in higher education teaching, measured by the unit of funding per student, not only in the current spending review period but throughout this Parliament. I hope that the Minister will be able to give that commitment today.
	It is always said at the start of each spending review that money will be tight, but I know that the universities will have to make the case more clearly than ever that additional public investment will continue to be needed. Although the income from fees will start to make a difference from 2006, it will, indeed, only be a start. Universities need investment to rebuild and replace ageing infrastructure, to fund pay modernisation and to address the historic imbalance in the funding for the teaching and support of part-time students. Universities UK has commissioned research into the circumstances and needs of part-time students and I hope that the Government will take note of the findings of that research when they become available, and act upon them.
	There will be other big decisions to make. The future of the research assessment exercise is still to be determined. The role of universities in their regions and within the skills agenda will continue to evolve. It is right that universities should be seen more and more as integral parts of the family of education providers. Universities are reaching wider in a number of ways—building links with further education, expanding into continual professional development, joining with regional development agencies and sector skills councils to ensure that they can make the maximum possible contribution to the regional and national economies.
	Finally, with the landscape of higher education changing so rapidly and the influence of our universities ever expanding, I look forward to what promises to be a busy parliamentary Session.

Baroness Morris of Bolton: My Lords, I, too, take the opportunity to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and my noble friend Lady Buscombe to their important roles in education and wish them well. I congratulate them both on their excellent debut performances and look forward to return matches. I also congratulate my noble friend Lord De Mauley on his excellent maiden speech.
	I look forward to the closing speech of my noble friend Lord Howe. Together with his responsibilities for health, my noble friend has for some years been our party spokesman for family and children. He has performed that task with his customary charm, decency and good common sense, and he commands the respect of the whole House. My noble friend has chosen to relinquish that part of his role, and it is my privilege to follow him as spokesman for family and children. However, in today's debate, I speak simply as me.
	I would also like to say how sad it is not to have the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, taking part in the debate on education and children. He was an expert on his brief and spoke with great passion, and we shall miss him.
	The two points in the gracious Speech that I would like to touch on are the child contact and inter-country adoption Bill and the work and families childcare Bill. In June last year, Michael Howard created the position of shadow Secretary of State for the Family, because he believes that the family is the most immediate and important group in which people share responsibility for one another's well-being—a sentiment that I endorse. However, tragically, some families break down, and those responsibilities fragment. Each year, between 150,000 and 200,000 parental couples separate. By the age of 16, almost 30 per cent of children, two-thirds aged under 10, will be affected by divorce. Most couples who split up make their own parenting arrangements, which in many cases are amicable and selfless, but others break down completely, resulting in increasing numbers of disputes.
	Within two years of separation, about 40 per cent of parents who do not live with their children lose all contact. For a number, that is simply because they walk away from their responsibilities. For others, it is a trauma. We have become only too aware of the heartache and anguish of some of the participants in those disputes. As the more extreme draw attention to their plight by scaling buildings or turning the air purple in Parliament, we cannot condone their behaviour, but the parent in many of us identifies with their desperation.
	As Theresa May said in a Conservative debate in another place last December,
	"too many children lose contact with parents who love them and too many families are torn apart, often spending miserable years trapped in our family court system".—[Official Report, Commons, 13/12/04; col. 1456.]
	It is difficult enough for a child to have his or her life turned upside down. However, wherever possible when safety is not an issue, exposure to all members of the family must be good. Surely, it must be right for children to spend quality time with their mother, father, grandparents and wider family.
	When a relationship breaks down and families are at their most fragile, the courts should be the last refuge. As such, the intent behind the child contact part of the Bill is right, but I have concerns about the method of delivery. The draft Bill was brought forward based on a pilot scheme—the family resolutions project. Sadly, it seems to be failing. I wonder whether the Minister can confirm that, despite spending of over £1 million, only six families have entered into the mediation process. If the legislation is to be the success that we all hope for, fundamental change must be made to solve the problem that blights too many families in Britain.
	In relation to inter-country adoption, I support the objectives of the Bill. Quality improvements and safeguards are the key considerations, especially where there are concerns about human trafficking and the sale of children. But where children come from dire backgrounds, with no hope of getting proper help in their own country, we should not seek to prevent their being adopted by loving parents able to give them a decent upbringing in the UK.
	I also welcome the commitment to offer greater support for working families and to improve the provision of childcare. However, I make a plea for more flexibility when the Government look at how to extend those facilities. Sure Start is a great concept. In principle, I support it. Excellent work has been carried out in some difficult areas. However, it is too prescriptive. At present, we have a take-it-or-leave-it state model, which is good for the parents and children whom it fits, but the starting point should be the other way round. After consultation with the community on its needs and on the provision already available, the care should be designed to adapt to parents and offer them the choice and flexibility that they require. I am concerned that any future development should work with existing provision rather than compete against it, so that we do not have a repeat of the current situation in which, for every two childcare places created, we lose one. If ever there was a need for stability, it is in childcare.
	I would also like to say something about local authority provision of youth services. I hope that local authorities will be encouraged to look at the wonderful work already being carried out by the voluntary sector. Bolton Lads and Girls Club, of which I was proud to be a director until a couple of years ago, is open 363 days a year. It looks after thousands of children, provides after-school clubs and holiday clubs and is nationally renowned for mentoring schemes. It operates outreach services. Trained youth workers go out to deal with gangs of youths who congregate on street corners with no real purpose. Yet, over £1 million per year, most of which comes from voluntary donations and grants, is required to keep the club's doors open. It necessitates endless form filling. There is always money for the newest and latest initiative, but it is the core activities that need funding. Clubs such as Bolton Lads and Girls Club are replicated throughout the country. They already have the expertise; they could do so much more.
	Finally—this was touched on by my noble friend Lord Patten—I make a personal plea. I believe passionately in small government. As Iain Duncan Smith once so graphically said, government should stand back, so that the people can step forward. That means legislating and interfering as little as possible. Despite what the Minister said in his opening speech, that is not happening. Unfortunately, the Government seem to regard it as a mark of their virility to have as much legislation and as many initiatives as possible. The professionals on the front line are dizzy, as they wade through more and more government directives. There is too much legislation and too many initiatives. I recommend the advice of the king in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
	"'Begin at the beginning', the King said, gravely, 'and go on until you come to the end: then stop'".

Lord Chan: My Lords, I join other noble Lords in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and I congratulate him on his wide-ranging maiden speech. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Warner, on his promotion to Minister of State for NHS Delivery.
	In Her Majesty's gracious Speech, new Bills were promised on health, including the health improvement and protection Bill, the mental health Bill and the NHS redress Bill, among others. There is once again a danger of the Government introducing more legislation to preoccupy NHS staff and to distract them from their primary function, which is to improve access to services, to improve the standard and quality of healthcare and to improve outcomes of care.
	I welcome the health improvement and protection Bill, which incorporates legislation on hospital hygiene and smoke-free public places and workplaces. Hospital hygiene has been a focus of the media because of the problem of infections acquired by some seriously ill patients admitted to hospital. Chief among those much-publicised infections has been MRSA. The media opinion and popular opinion that improved hospital hygiene would solve the increasing problem of MRSA is sadly an inaccurate and oversimplified misunderstanding of hospital and healthcare-acquired infections.
	I have been in discussions with the head of our hospital's infection control team at Wirral trust, an acute trust providing care for 320,000 people on Merseyside. The consultant microbiologist provided me with the following evidence of MRSA grown from blood samples of ill patients in the past two years. Between 10 per cent and 30 per cent of MRSA grown from blood cultures were from patients who were so ill at home that they required hospital admission. Clearly, those infections were not acquired in hospital; the infections were acquired in the community. An example of such an infection is the tragic case of Richard Campbell-Smith, an 18 year-old Royal Marine who recently died days after he was infected with MRSA acquired from a scratch on a training run.
	A further 10 per cent of MRSA was grown from the blood of patients who had urinary infections that did not lead to bacteraemia or blood poisoning. Therefore, those isolates were the result of contamination of bacteria on the patient's skin. Only in 60 per cent of ill patients were severe life-threatening MRSA infections acquired during their stay in hospital. Half of those patients had undergone surgical operations, and the other half had medical conditions such as pneumonia. There is therefore no simple solution to reducing MRSA infections in hospitals in the short term.
	Infection control in hospital is everyone's business, from the clinical and cleaning staff to patients' visitors. Because most people carry bacteria on their skin, scrupulous hand-washing, as has already been mentioned, is essential to prevent and control infections. In hospitals where infection control is being successfully implemented, all staff start their day by carefully washing their hands with plain soap or antiseptic hand-washing liquids, taking at least one minute to rub in between their fingers. After that, whenever clinical staff touch their patients they apply concentrated alcohol—about 70 per cent—in gel to their hands. That procedure kills all bacteria, including MRSA, in a matter of seconds. Visitors are also encouraged to apply concentrated alcohol gel to their hands. Of course, that best practice is nothing new. It has been used with great success in intensive care nurseries for newborn babies for the past 30 years.
	I therefore support the NHS chief executive's advice on tackling MRSA published in his report earlier this month. However, will the Minister please ensure that targets for the reduction of MRSA infections in hospital are applied with clinical appreciation and not as a statistical exercise? That should ensure that hospitals making good progress will not be penalised when their more difficult cases take longer to respond to treatment and to prevention of further infection.
	The news that a Bill will be introduced to make public places and workplaces smoke-free is most welcome. The Minister will no doubt be aware that many parents are ignoring warnings about smoking near their children. The case of five year-old Sol Rickman is a timely warning. Sol developed breathing difficulties, and when surgeons operated on him they discovered that he had lungs that looked like those of a lifelong smoker. His mother had been smoking 20 cigarettes a day since Sol was born. Every year, around 17,000 children under the age of five go into hospitals with asthma attacks and other breathing problems, bacterial meningitis, cot death—complaints all caused by the smoke from their parents' cigarettes. An ICM poll of 500 children found that 39 per cent of teenagers were exposed to cigarette smoke in the home when younger, while 13 per cent were exposed to it in cars. Will the Minister ensure that parents and adults are alerted again to the grave dangers of smoking near children?
	The next urgent public health concern is binge drinking among young adults, particularly female university students. A recent study on 120 female binge drinkers by Caitriona Byrne and David Clark, professor of psychology at Swansea University, showed that two out of three drank above the Government's weekly recommended limit. The three most common reasons for drinking alcohol were to get drunk and have fun; to be sociable; and to relax. The average consumption was 20.3 units, and the average amount spent was £25.64 per a week. Therefore, I welcome the scrapping of happy hour promotions by the 32,000 members of the British Beer and Pub Association. However, another one in three public houses have not supported that sensible ban on happy hour drinking, and some of them target female drinkers, inviting them to drink free of charge in some north-west cities. That age group, which is also likely to become pregnant when drunk, will cause damage to their offspring who will suffer brain dysfunction through the effects of alcohol on the developing foetus. The NHS should alert women to the dangers of alcohol consumption during pregnancy and recommend them to abstain when pregnant.
	The Government's alcohol harm reduction strategy for England—Strategy Unit 2004—stated:
	"Young people under the age of 16 are drinking twice as much today as they did 10 years ago, and report getting drunk earlier than their European peers".
	Will the Minister elaborate on how young people will be included in health action plans?
	For health protection of patients, the Government should press on with the statutory regulation of complementary and alternative medicine—CAM. Acupuncture is available to a limited extent in the NHS in pain clinics, during childbirth and for musculoskeletal complaints. A register of acupuncture practitioners should include both professionals working in NHS establishments and those who work in the private sector using traditional methods. Practitioners of herbal medicine should also be regulated. There is a need for practitioners of traditional medicine, such as traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic or Indian medicine, to be regulated separately under the proposed CAM council.
	A final issue in health improvement and protection involves the Government's plans for handling an outbreak of bird flu. Last week, 178 geese were found dead in Qinghai province in north-west China that had been infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus. That news, together with the deaths of at least 53 people in Vietnam and Thailand in the past 18 months, makes it important to have a report on the progress made by the NHS in preparing for the UK Influenza Pandemic Contingency Plan. Will the Minister indicate how many doses of antivirals have now been added to the 100,000 that we had last year?
	We should also examine the mental health Bill on providing a new legal framework for treating people with a mental disorder without their consent when they pose a risk to themselves or others. I do so as a non-executive director of my primary care trust with a brief for mental health and also after serving for three years on a mental health trust. The Government have continued, in spite of some stuttering and hesitation, to propose improvements in the healthcare of black and ethnic minority patients with mental illness. A significant catalyst has been the independent report into the death of David Bennett, a 38 year-old black man of Caribbean heritage with 20 years' history of schizophrenia.
	I congratulate the Government on producing a document in January this year on improving the mental healthcare of ethnic minority patients and also on answering questions and recommendations posed by the independent inquiry into David Bennett's death. In the document the Secretary of State for Health summarised the aims for mental health for ethnic minorities as,
	"equal access, equal treatment and equal outcomes".
	I hope that that ambition will be achieved as soon as possible.
	I remind the Minister that more black patients enter mental health care through compulsion with the assistance of police officers than by the normal pathway via GP referrals. Therefore, I am concerned that the new mental health Bill, if approved and applied without sensitivity and care to black and other minority ethnic mental health patients may lead to negative opinions among black and minority ethnic communities when a patient being detained without his consent dies in the process. I look forward to the Minister's response.

Lord Rosser: My Lords, I extend my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Adonis and to the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, on their eloquent and informed maiden speeches. I am not in any way an expert on education issues, and no doubt my contribution over the next few minutes will make that only too clear.
	However, not being an authority on an issue does not mean that one does not regard it as important, nor that one cannot have a view. The Government have a record of progress and achievement in education of which they can be proud, but everything is not yet as one would wish it to be. In particular, I want to comment on school discipline and levels of achievement in the basic skills.
	From friends in education, whose objectivity I respect, I am aware that school discipline is not just the issue it has long been, but that it has become more of an issue, albeit not to the extent that some have sought to imply in recent months. Reports and surveys have also suggested that the extent of low-level disruption in the classroom, for example, is not insignificant. Where disruption occurs it takes its toll on both the morale and enthusiasm of teachers and on the performance of pupils who want to learn and those who would if the environment were conducive to learning.
	We can all have a view on the causes, whether it be to place responsibility at the door of parents, teachers, the perceived relevance of some subjects studied, or of changing attitudes and values in society. The key question is what more we are going to do about disruption and when.
	I appreciate that a commission is being set up and that it will report later this year. I hope that when the time comes for decisions to be made, what will be paramount is the interests of the majority of pupils who either want to learn or would do so if they were not being influenced away from that goal by the activities of a small minority who disrupt for whatever reason.
	The quality of education received affects and determines the opportunities of young people or the opportunities that they will have in later life. We cannot stand by and see those opportunities being compromised and reduced for hundreds of thousands of children by the activities of a small minority, irrespective of the fact that the reasons why they disrupt are probably due to influences or factors over which they have had no control.
	I appreciate that there are already some arrangements for removing from the classroom or from the school those who seriously disrupt. The question is whether they are effective and whether they are being applied enough. I know that these arrangements vary, but where the remedy is simply to move a pupil who disrupts from one school to another similar school to carry on as before, that does not seem to achieve anything. Spreading or moving the problem around is not much of a solution.
	It certainly is not a solution either for the pupils who cause disruption. The consequences of not addressing their needs effectively are potentially serious both for the pupils in question and for the community as a whole. Those who disrupt, for whatever reason, are more likely to finish their time in the educational system with limited basic skills, limited opportunities ahead in life and probably a sense of failure and rejection despite the bravado that they sometimes seek to display.
	Somehow we have to get such pupils back on the right road, and we have to do it through means and channels that do not jeopardise the educational opportunities and chances of those who are receptive to the teaching they receive. I hope that the commission will provide some answers; albeit I suspect that those answers, if they are to be effective, may require considerable extra resources. I hope that the working group will also provide some effective short-term remedies since today's pupils cannot wait for the longer-term ones.
	My understanding, which I accept may be wrong, is that in terms of those achieving higher educational standards we compare favourably with other European countries, but this is not the case when it comes to the percentage who lack basic standards of educational achievement. Those who disrupt are likely to be among the low achievers as well as those whom their activities have adversely influenced.
	Poor educational achievement increases the likelihood of being unemployed long-term and with it the associated problems and temptations created by lack of financial resources. Failure to achieve basic educational standards is also a waste of a human resource and makes it more likely that for those affected life will be rather nearer an existence than a journey of purpose and enjoyment.
	There are also implications for the wider community. The causes of crime are many, but a significant percentage of those in prison are of low educational achievement and have previously had lengthy periods of unemployment, with all the associated difficulties that can flow from that.
	For a substantial majority of the prison population, the number of jobs that they are capable of carrying out on release is low. Providing opportunities for prisoners to improve basic educational skills in order to enhance their prospects of securing employment on release is a vital activity and an important part of the programme for reducing reoffending rates.
	Where inmates have spent their childhood years in this country, they are people who either did not or could not respond to the opportunities provided by the educational system, or people whom the educational system failed and whom the prison system is seeking to deliver, depending on which way we want to look at it.
	However, the message is clear. Continuing to increase the percentage of children who achieve the basic educational standards applicable to their age is crucial and must be the priority. The consequences of not doing so will be felt not just by the pupils themselves in later life but by society as a whole, since there is a connection between educational achievement—or rather, lack of it—and the likelihood of being sucked into at least a period of crime.
	It is also why school discipline is important, since disruption in the school, including low-level disruption, adversely affects levels of educational achievement, not just for the disrupters themselves but for all those pupils whose learning opportunities and thus chances in life may be adversely affected by the activities of those who disrupt.
	I appreciate that the response to my points will be that steps have already been announced to seek further effective rather than knee-jerk ways of addressing school discipline. However, I hope that the issue and that of further improving levels of attainment relevant to age in basic educational skills will continue to be pursued with vigour and urgency.

Lord Colwyn: My Lords, the trouble with a debate such as this, with different speakers covering three or four major subjects, is that it loses the usual flow associated with the high-class debates in this Chamber. After that brief foray into education, I apologise for taking us straight back to healthcare.
	The Government have again outlined some bold healthcare policies in the gracious Speech and in the media in the past few weeks. I support a number of the proposals, and it is encouraging that the Government at last see the value of the role of the private sector in the provision of NHS healthcare. Although I fully accept that change and reform in our healthcare system take time, the Government have to their credit attempted to take some tough decisions, such as the Prime Minister's recent pledge to offer more choice and personalised provision for patients.
	But that has not been followed through in all sections of healthcare. With healthcare professionals seemingly left out of that decision-making, there now seems even more indecision and uncertainty within the professions. That is nowhere more true than in NHS dentistry. It will be no surprise that I want to confine my remarks solely to dentistry. I have been in practice for nearly 40 years, half of which were in the National Health Service. I want to use my experience to encourage the Government to consider a radical reform agenda for primary care dentistry, just as they have done for secondary, hospital-based healthcare.
	The Government have undoubtedly attempted to be radical in NHS dentistry, and it would be churlish not to say so. The passing of the Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Act 2003, for example, represented some of the biggest changes to dental commissioning in the history of the NHS. I was happy to offer advice, and sometimes constructive criticism of the Government, during the legislative stages of the then Bill in this House, and was pleased by the details in the NHS dentistry: options for change White Paper of 2002, which clearly set out the way dentists would be able to get off the NHS treadmill of work.
	The Government have made strides towards changing a system that basically remains much as it was at the inception of the NHS in 1948, but that is also part of the problem. They seem unable to acknowledge that there are severe, endemic and terminal problems with the system. Queues for NHS dentistry seem to be the norm every time a new NHS practitioner opens his or her books to more patients, making the Prime Minister's 1999 pledge on NHS dental access the most misplaced and inappropriate political soundbite ever. But it is the failure to get to grips with the cumbersome and gigantic system of NHS dentistry that is most telling. The changes offered only tinker at the edges of the problem. There is not enough radical, bold and brave thinking.
	I acknowledge that the Government have committed themselves to a huge increase in funding for the NHS, but that increase has not been felt across the board. Last year, the Government's own auditors, the National Audit Office, showed what the dental profession had been saying for many years—that NHS dentistry has historically been underfunded. The NAO's report bears that out. NHS spending on high-street dentists per capita had increased by 9 per cent since 1990–91, compared with a 75 per cent per capita increase in overall NHS funding.
	The debate should not simply be about levels of headline funding but should be more radical. We need to think widely and consider future scenarios and possibilities. We need to make the tough decisions about better spending—not just more—and spending better in partnership with the private sector. In the discussions for the new NHS dental contract, the Government have publicly stated that they will guarantee all current income levels for NHS dentists for three years. That is welcome and has brought some measure of certainty to an increasingly uncertain process, but what happens after those three years? The Government have consistently dodged that question, and I fear that they have no idea what will happen either. They seem to be patching up the funding system as they go along.
	The personal dental service contract is another case in point. It was designed as a new type of contract—to move dentists away from item-of-service, piecemeal work to preventive-based, individually decided and tailored contracts. It was supposed to be a move away from a monolithic, "one size fits all" NHS contract, but in reality the Government have not been able to bring themselves to change the system that much after all. Those dentists who did mostly NHS work are shifting over to PDS, but the dentists doing more private work are not. A polarisation of the profession is now becoming much clearer.
	It could be said that all that PDS has done, on the face of it, is to replace one NHS system with another differently named, slightly different NHS system. It is better than the old contract, with the emphasis now on preventive-based dentistry, but it does not address the capacity issue within NHS dentistry. If increasing capacity was the Department of Health's overarching aim, it has failed. That is not a very radical way to reform the system.
	Patient charges are central to the way in which the Government plan to reform—or not—NHS dentistry. Yet they have been sitting on the Cayton review of patient charges for more than a year, and there is now talk that the report has been quietly binned. That secretive and over-careful approach from the Department of Health is not the way to start a debate on how to proceed with this incredibly important aspect of reform. It shows yet again how the Government are looking at the issues in isolation.
	The Government need to do some serious thinking on what sort of service they want to achieve and how it is going to be paid for. NHS dentistry has not been free at the point of delivery since 1951, despite this Government's mantra that NHS systems remain "free at the point of delivery". But whether they are free or charged for becomes completely irrelevant if NHS dental services are simply not available, which is the reality for too many people today. So, taking the new Government at their word, I challenge them to have a serious debate about NHS dentistry and to think radically.
	For example, should we consider focusing NHS dentistry solely on free services for only particular groups of the population, such as children, people with special needs and older people? The consequence would be that today's fee-paying adults would be taken out of NHS dental entitlement altogether. Should we reduce NHS dental care to a limited range of services, such as oral health assessments—that is, thorough check-ups—basic pain relief and fillings, and leave more complex treatments to be charged for? Should there be more use of dental patient insurance schemes—either state or corporate-run—with different levels of payment for different levels of service?
	I do not know the answers to those questions, but the Government need to start thinking in that wider manner. They need to pose those questions, and start a debate on where NHS dentistry is going and how it will be paid for. They promised in their election manifesto a "fundamental review" of the funding and scope of NHS dentistry, which I hope will cover the whole system and not merely certain parts of it.
	I said that I did not know the answers to the questions that I posed about which direction NHS dentistry should take and how it should be reformed, but on some aspects I can comment with authority, such as oral health. Good oral health, especially in children, is absolutely critical and plays a part in so many other social and health issues. If the Government are serious about showing themselves to be radical in their third term, tackling oral-health inequalities should be at the forefront of any future plans and public health strategies.
	The Government have made significant progress in that area, and I congratulate them particularly on the strong stance that they took in pressing for targeted water fluoridation to be put into statute. However, other areas can easily be tackled that would help to reduce some of the appalling oral-health inequalities that still exist in this country. Tackling what children eat and drink in our schools would be a good start. It is currently a very popular topic.
	Another aspect of improvement would be a better skill mix between dental professionals. At times, the dental profession has been guilty of not maximising the efficiencies of the whole dental team. Dental hygienists, therapists, technicians and nurses can all play a bigger role, but the Government have not offered much leadership or vision of how that skill mix can be expanded. Again, it is that sort of radical reform which is needed.
	The Government need to be bold and brave in their policy thinking. They need to expand the argument away from the narrow confines down which they are currently going of tinkering with parts of the system in isolation to everything else to prove that they are doing something about the problems. They should tackle the whole aspect of the system in one go. I hope that the Minister will react favourably to what I have outlined and bring my remarks to the attention of the appropriate Minister. I have attempted to be helpful to him by opening up those issues, but if the Government are serious about fulfilling their rhetoric on being radical in how NHS provision is delivered and structured, a good place to start would be NHS dentistry.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford: My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, I was going to remark on the degree to which this debate is something of a switchback from one subject to another. In saying that, we would ask the usual channels to think again about the practice in some past years of grouping subjects so that we have mini debates on the different items on the agenda in the Queen's Speech debates.
	I welcome, as others have done, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to the Front Bench. I thank him for a thoughtful and well crafted maiden speech in opening the debate. I echo the thoughts of my noble friend Lord Oakeshott that it is surely right that the noble Lord is now here on the Government Front Bench to defend the policies that he is promoting, rather than promoting them from the sofas at No. 10.
	Education was given a prominent place in the gracious Speech, but not at great length. The gracious Speech states:
	"Education remains my Government's main priority. My Government will further reform the education system to improve quality and choice in the provision of schooling, and build on the progress already made to improve educational standards for all".
	It does not tell us very much about the legislation that we shall see, but fortunately the DfES website, and the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, tell us somewhat more about what to expect by way of legislation.
	Four items appear in the agenda. First, there will be legislation giving greater parental involvement. The DfES background notes state that it is,
	"to give parents a greater role in their school's education and in raising the performance of the school",
	involving greater use of ICT and developing the concept of the pupil profile.
	Secondly, there will be new powers for Ofsted and LEAs to tackle school failure and under-performance. Again parents' concerns about school standards will be addressed. Thirdly, there will be greater independence for successful schools, encouraging all schools—including primary—to seek foundation status. Fourthly, new educational providers will be welcomed into the state system through the extension of the academies programme, and on other occasions when,
	"they can help to boost attainment and opportunity locally".
	In addition it is proposed to re-enact the School Transport Bill which had successfully passed through this House but fell in the other place at the end of the previous Session.
	My first and immediate reaction to the proposals is: why is legislation necessary? On all four areas we already have on the statute book legislation that provides all the powers necessary. On parental involvement, Section 408—on the provision of information—of the Education Act 1996 gives the Secretary of State wide powers to make regulations to provide parents with information about the progress of children.
	On school failures, LEAs already have wide powers to tackle schools failure and under-performance under Sections 14 to 17—on intervention by LEAs—of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 and under part 4—on intervention in schools causing concern—of the Education Act 2002.
	Ofsted itself has no operational powers over school closures or management and, if it is to retain its independent status, it is right that it should not have those powers. But the Secretary of State retains powers to close schools.
	On extending foundation status, the 2005 Act, which we have just passed, provides for fast tracking foundation status for secondary schools. Primary schools can be given the fast track by amending the regulations under Section 35—schools changing from one category to another—of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998.
	New providers can and do enter the maintained system under the provisions of Section 28 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. That has now been supplemented by the proposals of Section 66 of the Education Act 2005, which I say again we passed very recently in this House.
	In other words, with the exception of the re-enactment of the School Transport Bill, in none of these areas is legislation really necessary. Given that we are constantly being told how short the Government are of legislative time and how difficult it is to get parliamentary counsel to draft legislation—as is shown often by the poor drafting with which we are confronted—why are the Government bringing forward their proposals, thereby effectively, if I might say so, wasting Parliament's time? They do not need those powers; they already have them.
	As for the schools, colleges, teachers, parents and governors at the receiving end of all this legislation and regulations, why not give them a holiday from new regulations? At least one Education Bill has been passed for every year of this Government, and there has often been more than one.
	The Government are constantly changing the goalposts. We were told that in this third term the emphasis was to be on delivery. What is needed more than anything else is a chance to catch up and to consolidate the changes that are already in the system. Many in the profession consider that, with the implementation of the Children Bill, the establishment of children's trusts and, not least, the workforce agreement and three-year budgeting, they have enough on their plates to contend with and do not need new legislation.
	Therefore my first reaction was: why have this Bill? My second reaction was: what is the coherence of the measures? How do they hang together? The four main ideas being mooted come from the Labour manifesto and last year's Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners. The big idea then was personalisation, which has now been replaced by parent power. Then, as now, there are a number of inherent contradictions in the ideas. Competition or collaboration? Schools will be encouraged to form partnership clusters, yet simultaneously forced to compete with each other through league tables.
	I shall read the Select Committee's deliberations on the five-year strategy and the idea of partnership. It states:
	"The idea of schools working together to share expertise and hard to teach pupils is attractive, but we consider that the Secretary of State may be underestimating the challenges involved in realising this vision. Given the Government's current emphasis on standards and the consequent climate of competition between secondary schools in some areas, who wish to maintain their status in the league tables of results, many schools may not consider it to be in their interests to join partnerships".
	There is a lack of adherence to evidence-based policy. After 18 years of conviction politics under the Conservatives great hopes were held out in 1997 that the new Labour Government would make use of the wealth of policy analysis coming from the social science community in this country and elsewhere. It is fair to say that both at departmental level and in No. 10 there has been a flowering of policy studies. In broad terms, for example, the emphasis on early-years Sure Start policy has been influenced by those findings.
	But that has not happened in all areas of policy. Indeed, as time has passed we have seen a shift away from evidence-based policy back towards more conviction policy. For example, the issue of academies was dealt with at some length by my noble friend Lady Walmsley. Why have the Government not waited until the evidence from the 17 pilots that are already established has been evaluated? The Government might have heeded the results of some of the research they commissioned from Warwick and Newcastle universities about the experience of eight secondary schools in former coalfields whose GCSE results have improved in every one of the past five years. The research found that the key factor in turning a school around and achieving consistent improvements was not a super-head or super buildings, but having a team of well motivated teachers and a well trained leadership group with high expectations working with parents and the local community.
	There has been much discussion on the issue of discipline and behaviour in schools. Here, too, we need to look at the evidence and welcome the setting up of the taskforce of experts. Taking some of the populist element out of the debate, it is right that the Government have set up the taskforce. As my noble friend Lady Walmsley said, in so far as they are listening, it is good that the Government have done so.
	But again, the message is consistency. Schools should have clear codes of discipline that are adhered to and upheld by the school community. Being tough on bad behaviour is important, but in earlier debates in this House I have asked, and I ask again, whether the Government are being tough enough on the causes of bad behaviour.
	To pick up some of the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, I was struck by an article by Will Hutton in last week's Observer about the hidden problems of mental health in this country. It picks up an issue that was raised by the Evening Standard in February when it reported on a report by the Institute of Psychiatry that referred to an epidemic of mental illness among teenagers. Are noble Lords aware that it is reckoned that 10 per cent of young people aged five to 18 in this country have a diagnosable mental health disorder? That is 1.1 million children, all of whom would benefit from professional help and advice. In addition, the institute reckoned that there are a similar number with less serious problems who also need some help.
	Today's Guardian highlights an NSPCC report linking children's performance at school with abuse at home and showing, among other things, that maltreatment in the first five years of life triples the likelihood of a child having psychological, behavioural or academic problems at school. Being tough on the causes of indiscipline and bad behaviour means nipping these problems in the bud. We have to be positive about teaching good parenting—here again I echo the thoughts of my noble friend Lady Walmsley—and we should not leave parenting classes until after the horse has bolted and the young people are out of control. At least in the first instance, we have to provide help and counselling for these young people in school so that we can begin to sort out their problems before they become unmanageable.
	I shall end with a short word about the Tomlinson report. On these Benches, there was considerable disappointment that the Government spurned the recommendation to develop a new school-leaving diploma system. The Tomlinson report was commissioned after the A-level fiasco of 2002, but we also need to look at the whole question of the disaffected teenagers who the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, mentioned, and at why so many young people—roughly 10 per cent of those in school—are so turned off learning.
	Tomlinson gathered together some of the country's experts in this area of education to think about how best to rejig this stage of education so that all children felt that they got something worthwhile from it. The experts spent two years in a very open process of deliberation. The essence of what he proposed was to build a structure of qualifications for those between 14 and 19 that bridged the academic and vocational divide and provided a route to lifelong learning. In a world of global competition and continuous innovation, we know that in the future training and retraining will become an essential part of life. Therefore, putting in place between the ages of 14 and 19 the early building blocks for lifelong learning is vital for the competitiveness of this country, but we should not forget that it is also vital to the fulfilment of the individual.
	Let me come back to where I began. In the education sector there is much worthwhile work that needs to be done and completed. It is a shame that we seem to be going to have to spend so much time and energy on unnecessary legislation.

Lord Skidelsky: My Lords, the gracious Speech reaffirms the fact that education remains the main priority of the Government. I want to speak to that and, in particular, about schools, but, before I start, I echo the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp. I am disappointed that the usual channels have not made an attempt to group the topics of this debate. In a multi-topic debate, unless grouping is done, there is a random distribution of speeches, which is not what most of us think of as a debate. I hope that this will be the last year in which we suffer under that formula.
	After spending a great deal of the 1990s making speeches on education, I took a vow never to open my mouth on the subject again, at least in public. Quite honestly, I was disappointed with the low quality of thought and language that seemed obligatory in discussing educational topics. I suppose my peak as an educational guru came when the Times printed my name with the byline "leading British educationalist" under a very large photograph of Mr Nelson Mandela. I thought that the time had come for me to retire from the fray.
	I have been tempted to re-engage by two things. First, this debate gives me an opportunity to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, on his elevation and on his appointment with responsibility for schools. His impressive, confident and well crafted speech gives an indication of the quality of the contributions that we can expect in our debates. I only hope that his flame is not extinguished by ministerial responsibilities.
	Secondly, I have been modestly encouraged by the Government's—or perhaps I should say, by the Prime Minister's—education policy. For as long as I can remember, education policy has lurched around in a kind of drunken frenzy, with structures, curricula and examinations all in a continual state of upheaval. Generations of our schoolchildren, our most valuable asset, have been sacrificed on the altar of ideology, muddle, incompetence and vested interest. Ever since I can remember that has been true. There are welcome signs that that era is now coming to an end. For the first time, one feels that there is a coherent strategy in place for raising school standards. Whether it will work or not only time will tell, but there is a strategy.
	Let me pick out three principles from the Government's five-year strategy—I almost said "five-year plan"—for children and learners, which was issued last July. First, it seems that the line has finally been drawn under what Alastair Campbell called "the bog-standard comprehensive". I say "seems" because there is a gap between rhetoric and reality, and one is still waiting to see how it will be bridged. The Government have accepted the principle, at least for secondary schools in England, that there will be a variety of schools, each offering something a little different. We now have the remaining grammar schools, special schools, city technology colleges, specialist schools and the new academies that are coming on stream. The Government intend that 95 per cent of all secondary schools will be either specialist schools or academies by 2008. That is not a pipe dream; 2,000 of the 3,000 secondary schools are already in the process of becoming specialist schools.
	Secondly, parental choice is enthroned as a principle of allocation, rather than LEA allocation. The Government assert the right of,
	"every parent to choose from a range of modernised specialist schools or academies".
	What that means, or should mean, is that schools for which there is a high demand will be allowed to expand, even if that creates surplus places in schools that parents shun. Those of us who urged that principle in the 1990s could not get the Conservative governments of the day to accept it. I am glad that it has been accepted.
	Finally, the five-year strategy envisages a further reduction in the role of local education authorities. Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, I welcome that. The city technology colleges are already outside LEA control and so are the new academies. They are both examples of the fashionable public/private partnership idea. Specialist schools can become foundations schools, which makes them sole owners of their land and buildings and the legal employers of their staff. So, an enlarging number of publicly funded schools will increasingly correspond to the legal status of independent private schools.
	The philosophy of that approach goes all the way back to the 1980s and to the quasi-market ideas of that period. The Thatcher governments would really have liked to privatise all the public services, but, when that proved to be politically impossible, they settled on the next best thing, which was to marketise them. In education, schools should be allowed to compete for pupils within a publicly funded system. It was that competition between schools for pupils that was supposed to drive up standards and increase efficiency.
	I am describing the logic of this kind of system, not the system that we actually have. Diversity and choice in public services are difficult for Labour to accept, smacking too much of the supermarket. As far as I can judge, parental choice as a lever for driving up standards has not played a prominent part in government thinking. That thinking focuses much more on target setting, based on a centralised curriculum and examination system. Similarly, the Government see the specialist focus of the specialist schools as a catalyst for internal school improvement, rather than as a magnet to attract parents. It is not what the Government think now that matters, though; it is the framework that they set up and whether it can expand or restrict future development. Here I am moderately hopeful.
	So, then, two cheers. There are some snags, however, and the Government will have to go further and shed some of their illusions if we are ever to achieve a first-class public education system. First, it seems at least possible that the "specialist" label will turn out to be largely cosmetic. The Commons Select Committee on Education has had fun with a debate between two professors, one claiming that specialist schools outperform non-specialist schools, the other that they do not. Both ignore the larger point, it seems to me, which is that any comparison between specialist and non-specialist schools will probably favour the former, whichever way the data are cooked. That is because the most dynamic, entrepreneurial heads and governing bodies will apply for specialist status, and their schools will do better with the same children, whether they are called specialist or not. So when all the schools are called specialist, will we just be back, with a few small variations, to the "bog-standard comprehensive"?
	My second point is about foundation schools. They will become the sole owners of their buildings and land, but, as I understand it, they will not be allowed to collateralise their assets for loans. That takes away most of the benefit of ownership, in particular the ability to finance expansion in response to demand. Not even the Conservatives are willing to allow borrowing by secondary schools. That topic will have to be revisited. The Government talk about "independent specialist schools", and I believe that the right to borrow is integral to the concept of independence.
	Finally—here I am on controversial ground, beyond what anyone has said in this debate—I doubt how far improvement in standards can go without introducing means-tested fees, at least into secondary schools. That is the only way of locking parents into the drive for higher standards.
	There are already signs that the target-setting approach is running out of steam. A study led by Professor Peter Tymms of Durham University found earlier this month that, despite a 58 per cent increase in annual spending on education since 1997, measurable achievements—such as the number of children able to read and write properly on arrival in secondary schools—have levelled off, or indeed are dropping. The fact is that, unless people pay for something, they do not value it, or at least value it as much.
	I do not suppose for a moment that these issues will be resolved in a day, but they will be at the heart of the debate over education policy in coming years, together with the future of 16–18 education and the exams appropriate to it, the funding of universities and so on. The arrival of the new Minister for Schools at least promises us a more interesting educational time in this House than we have had for some time past, and I wish him all the best.

Baroness Wilkins: My Lords, I, too, congratulate both noble Lords on their maiden speeches, and welcome my noble friend Lord Adonis to the Front Bench. I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Warner on his new post, and welcome my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath back to the Front Bench.
	I will be changing the theme of this evening's debate yet again, and will be speaking on the area of social affairs—specifically about independent living, which will be one of the main issues for disabled people during this Parliament. I declare my interests, both as president of the College of Occupational Therapists and as vice-chair of my local disabled people's organisation, which is HAFAD.
	First, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Hollis of Heigham for the major contribution she has made to furthering disabled people's civil rights during her time as Minister, and particularly for her work on the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. As she has shown in her outstanding speech today, her perceptiveness, her knowledge and tenacity are daunting, and we owe her a great debt.
	I welcome the confirmation in the Queen's Speech that the Government will continue with their reform of public services to promote opportunity and fairness, and their emphasis on choice and diversity. A touchstone of this reform will be the progress that is made during this Parliament towards enabling independent living for disabled people. The Strategy Unit report, Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People, published in January this year, set out the Government's vision that,
	"By 2025, disabled people in Britain should have full opportunities and choices to improve their quality of life and will be respected and included as equal members of society".
	The promotion of independent living sits at the heart of this strategy, and it is essential that the building blocks for its realisation are set in place during this Parliament. To me the most important of these are accessible housing, individual budgets and a network of centres for independent living.
	"Independent living" is often misunderstood. It does not mean disabled people doing everything for themselves. It is about choice, control and freedom. It is about services enabling disabled people to have the same choice, control and freedom as any other citizen, at home, in education at work and as members of the community, so that we can become equal citizens.
	The disabled people's Independent Living Movement grew out of the experience of a group of severely disabled university students back in the 1960s on the Berkeley campus in the USA. They included the late Ed Roberts, a quadriplegic who was on a ventilator. These students, originally in a hospital wing, began to realise that if services were organised around their own needs—for instance, with personal assistants getting them up and putting them to bed when they themselves wanted—they could lead lives as full and active as any other student. That was the start of the first CIL, or centre for independent living. By the time I interviewed Ed Roberts for a documentary in the early 1980s, there were scores of them throughout the United States, and he was head of rehabilitation for the city of Sacramento.
	In Britain, the Derbyshire CIL, developed by Ken and Maggie Davis, was among the first to appear in the 1980s, along with the Hampshire CIL, developed by residents from Le Court Cheshire Home, and the Greenwich CIL, led by Rachel Hurst. They developed the original Berkeley list of five core services essential to enable disabled people to live independently—that is, accessible housing, personal assistance, accessible transport, an accessible environment and peer counselling—and added information and technical assistance. Since then, a further five basic needs have been added to that list: an adequate income, inclusive education and training, equal opportunities for employment, advocacy, and appropriate and accessible healthcare provision. That list demonstrates the breadth of reform that is required.
	The Strategy Unit report, which is in effect a White Paper, as it has been agreed by all the relevant departments—the DWP, the ODPM, the Department of Health and the DfES—recognises that,
	"One of the most significant barriers to enabling disabled people to be full citizens is the culture of care and dependency within health and social care structures".
	This culture effectively fits people to services, rather than services to people.
	The report stresses that a new approach to supporting disabled people is needed, in line with the Government's new vision for adult social care set out in the Green Paper in March. This approach would allocate available resources according to individual needs in the form of an individual budget, which could be taken in cash or services. The disabled person would know the amount he or she had to spend and would have more flexibility in choice in the support and equipment needed.
	This approach to independent living would not only improve disabled people's lives immeasurably but would also represent a sound, social and economic investment. Government departments need to jettison their silo mentality in order to see the whole picture and recognise that higher expenditure in one area can mean much lower expenditure in another. There is clear evidence that investment in aids and adaptations can reduce expenditure on social care, reduce hospital admissions and prevent delays in hospital discharge. For example, the Audit Commission estimates that £130 million is spent each year as a result of falls by people with a visual impairment, which could be avoided with suitable aids and adaptations.
	Disabled people and their organisations have welcomed the Government's proposals to extend choice and control through individual budgets. It is very important, however, that their implementation is done in a way that really delivers self-determination for disabled people. Centres for independent living will be crucial here because, controlled and run by disabled people, they have already performed a key role in enabling disabled people to use direct payments to provide real choice and control in their lives.
	Indeed, Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People recognises that by committing the Government to a user-led organisation modelled on CILs in each social services area by 2010. Unfortunately, this commitment is not mentioned in the Green Paper.
	That is worrying. We should learn from the past that public policy is vastly improved and resources are used more effectively in the disability field if disabled people are fully involved. However, strong organisations cannot be conjured out of thin air. There is a need for capacity building among disabled people and their organisations and for this resources are essential.
	My third point concerns successful housing—the bedrock of independent living. How can you have any control and choice in your life unless you can get around and in and out of your own home, let alone any others? As the John Grooms Housing Association points out in its current Build for Equality campaign, there is a chronic lack of accessible housing—currently a countrywide shortfall of 300,000 wheelchair-accessible houses.
	Following the housing announcements this morning, could my noble friend the Minister give me an assurance that the Government will heed the campaign's call that 10 per cent of all new housing should be built to wheelchair standard, as is the requirement in London. Urgent action needs to be taken as the housing industry has ignored the needs of disabled people for far too long.
	But new build can address only a small portion of the problem. The Strategy Unit report recommends urgent action on the current disabled facilities grant system, which creates significant barriers both to disabled adults and to families with a disabled child. I look forward to the conclusion of the ODPM review of the disabled facilities grant, which is due to be published next month and hope that at the very least it follows the action of Northern Ireland and Wales in abolishing the means test for families with disabled children.
	I understand that the ODPM commissioned a comprehensive piece of research from Frances Hayward of Bristol University, who is an expert in this field. Will that research be published along with the review group's recommendations, so that we can see the basis on which the decisions have been made?
	Many disabled people were dismayed that the Government expect that it will take another 20 years, until 2025, before we can be fully included as equal members of society. It is about 20 years since I was exploring these issues in a Channel 4 documentary in Derbyshire where the CIL had challenged the paternalism of the social services department by making a bid to run the local residential home. It challenged the "duty of care", which is as radical today as it was then, and we have much to do before our statutory services begin to adopt instead a "duty of equality" as is called for in the DEMOS report Independent Living: the right to be equal citizens, which is to be launched tomorrow.
	We need to start now on the major transformation of structures and culture that this will require, or it will take much longer than those 20 years.

Baroness Greengross: My Lords, I add my congratulations to the two noble Lords who made maiden speeches on subjects very dear to my heart. I congratulate the Ministers on the Front Bench on their return or promotion and the new people on the Front Benches opposite. I also pay tribute to the predecessor of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, whose superb grasp of social security and related issues was outstanding.
	I do not propose to speak on DWP issues today, other than to say that I look forward to the very important conclusions of the Turner commission, the reforms to incapacity and housing benefit and perhaps, in particular, the Bill to regulate equity release products, which I hope will be enacted as soon as possible because that is a very important issue.
	I want to concentrate mainly on health and social care and to touch on, to begin with, what was in the gracious Speech. There is a Bill to provide for better protection of children and vulnerable adults. Following the Bichard report, I await that Bill with interest as I have long been concerned about gaps in protection, especially from people who are unsuitable to work with vulnerable adults but who do not have a criminal record. That very difficult subject needs to be tackled.
	We need to make the protection of vulnerable adults lists work better and to close the gaps, particularly for people who work in day centres, the NHS and the non-personal aspects of domiciliary support which are not covered. Will the Bill cover non-physical abuse—for example, financial abuse? We debated that on the Mental Capacity Bill in the previous Session, but they are important issues.
	Perhaps we need a step change in attitude as well as legislation, as we have seen with age discrimination more generally. I hope that the Government will make this part of the "respect agenda" which we have been reading about—I think it would be a good idea to consider it as such.
	Obviously the hospital hygiene Bill is very important, but will it apply to long-term care homes as well as hospitals? It should but, if it does, that means that the sector providing such homes should be fully consulted by the department about its impact.
	I turn to the Older People Commissioner (Wales) Bill. I very much welcome it. I think that commissioners for older people could become very important as a way in which older people's rights are better respected and better recognised. Again, that could be seen as part of the respect agenda and might reflect the importance of valuing older people and their needs and appropriate ways of meeting them, especially perhaps helping older people with complaints on health and social care issues. Those issues are a nightmare for older people and their families to deal with at the moment, and they are not always dealt with very successfully. Will the Government consider extending such appointments across England, or could they do so if they are not considering it at present?
	The Equality Bill is very important. It was covered in last week's debate but I mention it as an important development in education, health and social affairs. I look forward to taking part in that Bill's passage through this House. I congratulate the Government on removing the age limit on student loans. That was an excellent step in combating age discrimination.
	The mental health Bill is a long overdue reform of mental health laws, but worries have been expressed by Age Concern, among other organisations, that it will work to the detriment of many people with long-term mental health problems because in many aspects it is too prohibitive and punitive. When the Bill comes to this House, I would like reassurance that that will not be the case. It needs very careful scrutiny.
	There are other issues which are not in the gracious Speech but which require consideration at this stage. I welcome the recognition in the Green Paper on adult social care of the importance of low-level social care, but we all know that that will need funding. Individual budgets may help to give many vulnerable people, particularly older people, much more control over the services that they receive.
	Housing is key to the quality of life of older people and those with disabilities, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, has made clear. It is excellent that the needs of such people will be regularly assessed and that the strategy will be forward-looking and run over the next 10 to 15 years.
	A current Counsel and Care survey about what older people want, chaired by Malcolm Dean, highlights the importance of low-level care. Older people tend to underplay the help that they need. Much of that help is not social care; it might be window cleaning or shopping, for example. We need to think in new ways if we are to meet the needs of vulnerable people. We must go into the realms of Internet shopping and dial-a-ride services, not just traditional home-help services.
	The government Strategy on Ageing, published last March, is a very important step forward. It contains many challenging aspects—for example, the proposed observatory on ageing to look at the wider impact of our changing demography. I hope that the newly formed Cabinet sub-committee on ageing will be instrumental in ensuring that promises are delivered, for example, on lifelong learning, the imminent abolition of age limits and other aspects of life, which will reflect a wider shift in attitude to the effect that education and training are, and should be, lifelong. It is the same across health and social affairs.
	As vice-president of Age Concern, I welcome the OFT's recent report on care homes. I hope that the Government will respond with action as a priority, because the problems of paying for care are excessive. It must include the impact of local authority care provision.
	The importance of social care will, I believe, be highlighted by the forthcoming Wanless report, commissioned by the King's Fund. We need clarity about continuing care—the Health Ombudsman recently highlighted the ongoing scandal. I should like a more proactive and open stance from the Department of Health on that issue. We need clarity about the definition of health versus social care versus nursing care. I remain convinced that more people, if assessed for continuing care under the Community Care (Delayed Discharges etc.) Act 2003, should be eligible to receive it.
	Lastly, on end of life issues, today's Help the Aged report makes for salutary reading. It states:
	"Older people who die in hospital often endure their final days in dirty and noisy wards where busy medical and nursing staff can devote little attention to them".
	That is a scandal. As Macmillan Cancer Relief also highlighted, most older people would like to die in their own home but do not. End of life is an area in which Her Majesty's Government can and should do much more.

Baroness Howarth of Breckland: My Lords, the Government introduced a plethora of social legislation in the previous Parliament and have a further raft in the forthcoming Session. Much of it is to be welcomed and is indicative of the seriousness of the Government's thinking about some of the most challenging issues affecting many of the most vulnerable in society. It includes the introduction of a barring and vetting scheme to protect children and vulnerable adults; the establishment of a framework for treating people with mental illness; and improvement of hygiene inspection in social care settings, such as care homes. In addition, the Government are intent on strengthening family life by securing sufficient childcare provision, the extension of statutory maternity pay and keeping children central to planning during court and contact procedures.
	I should commiserate with rather than congratulate the gentlemen on the Front Bench at this time; however, I join with other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lords, Lord Hunt and Lord Warner, and welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to the Bench.
	Alongside all that the Government have been consulting on the Green Paper Independence, Well-being and Choice, which seeks to put older people who use services in control of their lives by personalised budgets and direct payments; consulting on workforce planning for children's services; and looking to eliminate smoking in some public places. I do not have time to speak about smoking in public places today but it has been covered well by the noble Lord, Lord Chan, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and I shall watch it with considerable interest—as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, knows, I was frustrated by the terrorism Bill in bringing forward an enabling Bill for London in the previous Session. I will be back.
	The Government are serious in their thinking, but what about implementation? Have they found a way of dealing with the problems of constant change, which in my long experience has always resulted in a loss of service to the user? What about quality as well as quantity? If I did not know differently of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, I would think that no member of the Government had ever run anything, that they knew nothing of how to manage morale in large organisations or had simply decided to ignore all research into the management of change and the development of quality. Blue-sky thinking is important, strategic direction is essential, and change inevitable and often positive. But it must be combined with practical consideration of what will bring results. So can we look for some institutional stability alongside the rush for reform, as well as good risk assessment of the outcomes of changes?
	Take, for example, the moves already announced to merge, yet again, the body responsible for social care inspection and that of the healthcare commission into one. Health and social care sound pretty similar, so why not lump them together? But even the ordinary consumer knows that there are serious differences between the two: healthcare is universal, while social care focuses resources on some very vulnerable people; health services are dominated by hospitals, and within that on acute services, while social care is largely local with many community-based services. I remember the chief executive of a hospital telling a conference I chaired that, if it came to a choice between delivering good safeguarding for children by providing a focus for the local children's trust within his hospital and delivering acute adult services, the latter would always come first. He had to achieve his targets, after all. Hip replacements will always win out against children's mental health.
	The proposed changes will repeat a process undergone in the previous Parliament by the predecessor of the CSCI, the National Care Standards Commission, of which I was deputy chairwoman. I am not sure that any group of staff and service-users should be subjected to that degree of disruption unless they are failing. There is nothing to suggest that it is failing; indeed, were there enough time, I could list its considerable achievements, but some have already been mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. If we are to undergo the process again, can the Minister ensure that service users and providers are not only given the opportunity to make known their views on the most appropriate way forward for social care inspection, but that they are really listened to and heard? After all, the Government consider themselves to be a listening government.
	One of the considerable contributions of social care inspection has been how it has drawn attention to the need to ensure a well trained and skilled workforce. I welcome the Government's vision in their most recent consultation, the Children's Workforce Strategy. It talks of stabilising the workforce, learning from existing good practice, improving training and the development of practitioners. But those at the front line will tell you that they have heard it all before. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, was central to one such report. What will be different this time? How will DfES achieve the aim of making the work attractive and promoting more entry routes, to quote the document, especially for social workers, where there is a chronic shortage of trained personnel?
	As deputy chair of CAFCASS, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, I regularly encounter these issues. We grapple with staff shortages, complex work programmes and policy changes along with societal attitudes about families in emotional turmoil and how they should be dealt with. I pay tribute to the CAFCASS workers, who have had much to contend with. Throughout, most never lost sight of the children whom they were there to safeguard and protect. There is much to change in the organisation, but that central concern for the child must be fostered throughout.
	Much of the children, contact and adoption Bill will fall to the agency to implement. The paramount needs of children must be strengthened through legislation. Measures must be workable and decently resourced. Everyone in the Court Service recognises that there are problems with facilitation and enforcement of contact orders, but the assessment of the child's needs, not the wishes of adults, must remain central. There is no place for automatic 50:50 shared care; children are not property to be divided up. I am sure from previous pronouncements that the Government agree with that, but I seek further reassurance.
	Neither should contact arrangements be forced by unresearched beliefs. Not all children benefit from contact with fathers who are violent and controlling; and not all mothers are reasonable in complying with orders for contact. Of course children have a right to contact with their family, if that contact contributes to their care and development. That may not bring about a question about safety. However, with the Joint Committee, of which I was a member, I hope that the Government will favour time and place requirements for non-compliance of either parent, rather than other suggested measures such as electric—I cannot even say it; I mean electronic—tagging. That will have detrimental effects on already strained and complex family relationships.
	The serious problem about taking part in the address on the Queen's Speech is how topics are divided up. For many children and adults in trouble or need, where a service comes from has little consequence as long as the service meets their need. That often reflects splits between departments. Although the Government are encouraging all those delivering services to work together, could they try a little harder to do the same? For example, while the Government contemplate whether to deliver the National Offender Management Scheme—yesterday's topic—some organisations dependent on grants for services for children who have been sexually abused or are themselves abusers—perhaps in both categories—are put at risk as the grants to pay for these services become regional. While the Government sort that out, schemes may well be lost.
	We cannot afford to lose schemes. Some 10 years ago, as chief executive of Childline, I was involved with the charity NCH in considering the problems surrounding children and young people who abuse other young people. We found an astounding lack of knowledge and facilities to deal with that complex problem. In the previous Parliament, we had legislation about sexual offences and domestic violence—both welcome. There is now good research to show that one strong contributor to the behaviour of young men who sexually abuse is growing up in a home where there is sustained domestic violence.
	However, despite the growth of understanding and the legislation, where are the services? This week, the All-Parliamentary Group on Children revisited the topic. Presentations from Barnardo's, Childline, the Stop It Now Campaign and the NSPCC were consistent in drawing attention to the lack of projects and the inconsistency of treatment of these young people. It is sheer chance if they find themselves in the criminal justice system or identified as a child in need. Remember, almost without exception, they will have experienced chaotic upbringings, may have been abused themselves and be fearful about what they have done and the consequences.
	However, the way we arrange services leaves them and their future victims vulnerable. If you are lucky, you may end up in a quality placement in one of the few Barnardo's projects with the hope of a future but, more likely, the placement will be in a young offenders' institution, where you may or may not get help—or even, bizarrely, in a mixed children's home with every possibility of reoffending. Many need mental health services but the new legislation seems unlikely to improve the long waiting lists for child and adolescent mental health services—unless the Minister has a surprise answer up his sleeve.
	It is pointless providing education, education, education for those children who are emotionally unable to make use of it without help. Who does the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, think will look after those children once they are excluded from school—I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Prosser, that that sometimes must happen? That will be the social workers either in the local authority or the youth offending teams. Given the way that the noble Lord has spoken up for teachers, I hope that he will also speak up for social workers, who also need strengthening.
	So, as we move into the next phase of legislation, we ask the Government to be mindful of the consequences of their plans. What might look tidy may have negative consequences for service delivery; what appears like justice may lead to further injustice; and the failure of local services to work together may be a reflection of higher disfunctioning. Thinking and strategic vision are of value only if the outcomes bring practical benefit and services to those in need.

Lord Mitchell: My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Hunt on his return to the Front Benches—he has been sorely missed—and my noble friend Lord Warner on his new position. Most of all, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Adonis on his wide-ranging maiden speech and on his appointment as Minister for Schools. The press have had a field day over his appointment, but he has borne the criticism with good grace and humour. The academy schools project has been championed by my noble friend for many years. When the history books are written, academy schools will feature as one of the key new Labour initiatives that changed secondary education in this country for ever and for the better. For that, my noble friend will deserve every credit.
	Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney is one such school. It is sponsored by a good friend of mine, Sir Clive Bourne, who himself is no slouch in getting things done, and I have seen the creation of something visionary and inspirational in an area where vision and inspiration have been in short supply. The building is stunning; the layout is well designed; and, for a high-tech person such as myself, it is a joy to see state-of-the-art equipment being used by all the children throughout the school. The school lunches are not only edible but tasty—I have sampled them myself—and, in the school, the children eat fruit and vegetables. It is obvious to even the most casual observer that the children are disciplined and enthusiastic; the teachers are motivated; but, most of all, the parents now have hope where once there was only despair.
	Of course, there are doubters; there always are. But consider this gem from the streets of Hackney: the local estate agents now take pride when they have a house for sale located in the Mossbourne catchment area. They know a good thing when they see one. That academy, and those like it, are a positive force for good.
	I concentrate my words today on a disturbing trend that is becoming increasingly present on some of our university campuses. In raising this matter in your Lordships' House, I am conscious of how easy it is to exaggerate, so I choose my words carefully. I am talking about a growing trend of anti-Jewish outbursts. I am Jewish, but I am generally slow to rise to the bait of prejudice. Such things can so often be misjudged by oversensitive souls, but the signs are worrying.
	On an anecdotal basis, friends tell me that their sons and daughters at university are subject to hostility because they support Jewish causes and, in particular, when they express their support for Israel. Of course, that has increased since 9/11. The issue was addressed in the impressive report of the Home Affairs Select Committee prepared in another place on terrorism and community relations. Having received evidence from a number of sources, including representatives of both the Jewish and Muslim communities, it expressed its concern about the level of anti-Semitism on campuses. It urged the university authorities to act swiftly when such problems were brought to their attention and reminded them of their duties under the Race Relations Act 1976 and its applicability to student unions. Perhaps the Minister will add his voice to those calls in his wind-up speech.
	Now there is another development, which again indicates that our campuses are becoming uncomfortable for Jews. In the past few weeks, the Association of University Teachers has taken the decision to boycott two Israeli universities—Haifa and Bar-Ilan—with further threats to ban two others, including the Weizmann Institute. Here I must declare an interest: I am chair of Weizmann UK, and I serve on the executive council of that institute in Israel.
	Whatever Israel may or may not be, it is not a monolithic state. Everyone is opinionated on every subject under the sun. As the old adage goes, every time you get two Israelis together, they have three opinions. That certainly holds true. If you want vibrant democracy, that is the place to go. Nowhere is intellectual debate and rigorous discussion more intense than on the Israeli campuses. Nowhere is the pursuit of peace and the necessity of a two-state solution more forcefully articulated than in the gardens and canteens of those universities. That is where the Israeli peace movement is most active, so for the AUT to single out those institutions for boycott is totally misguided. It has implied that Israeli universities are no-go areas for Arab students. That simply is not true. Haifa University has 20 per cent Arab students, and many Arabs are on the faculty. The Weizmann Institute has an eminent Arab professor and many Arab research students—both Israeli Arab and Palestinian.
	The institute, like so many other Israeli universities, is right at the forefront in working closely with other universities in Arab countries, with the specific aim of improving the region for all. For example, there is a joint Egyptian-American-Israeli project designed to combat parasitic weeds that devastate agriculture. Also in the area of plant research, there is a joint study with Egypt and Jordan within the framework of the National Plant Genome Centre. The goal is to accelerate the breeding of crops adapted to regional conditions.
	I could also cite the Ben-Gurion University, the Hebrew University and Haifa itself to show how Israelis and Arabs are co-operating and getting on with the business of making life better for all. They do that in medicine, genetics, agriculture and even archaeology.
	Last week, at the Royal Society in London, an important joint declaration was made. It stated:
	"Cognizant of the moral leadership universities should provide, especially in already turbulent political contexts, we, the President of Al-Quds University and the President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have agreed to insist on continuing to work together in the pursuit of knowledge, for the benefit of our peoples and the promotion of peace and justice in the Middle East.
	"Our position is based upon the belief that it is through cooperation based on mutual respect, rather than through boycotts and discrimination, that our common goals can be achieved.
	"Our disaffection with, and condemnation of acts of academic boycotts and discrimination against scholars and institutions, is predicated on the principles of academic freedom, human rights, and equality between nations and among individuals".
	It would seem to me that the AUT has seriously misjudged its target. I also believe that it has misjudged its timing.
	Hesitantly, but with determination, the peace process in the Middle East moves forward. Against domestic resistance that we often underestimate, Prime Minister Sharon is set on a course to evacuate Gaza in the next few months. Similarly, in the face of constant internal hostility, President Abbas is trying to bring order to his fractious community. For those two men and their respective communities, the going is tough. Both leaders face civil strife, and both are under threat for their lives. But the mood, while fragile, is also cautiously optimistic.
	One thing is certain: the participants need all the help that we can give. Equally certain is the fact that misconstrued boycotts hinder rather than help. I have listened to what the AUT has to say, but I am still left with one nagging question: why is the boycott solely directed at Israel? Why is it not directed at universities in China, when that country still occupies Tibet and persecutes its students; or why not at Russia for its continuing butchery in Muslim Chechnya; or why not Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or Syria, which allow no student dissent whatever? When the AUT executive is handing out its boycott notices, why are not those, and a hundred other totalitarian countries like them, also included? Why does it pick on the only democracy in the region? Is it not just one more example of the pervasive double standard—blame Israel for everything and turn a blind eye to everywhere else?
	What can we do to help? Tomorrow morning, the AUT will reconsider its motion. I fervently hope that the delegates will think again and vote against the boycott. I call on them to heed the 20 Nobel laureates and more than 45,000 members of the public who have signed an Internet petition urging that the boycott motion be defeated. I call on the university authorities, the chancellors, the vice-chancellors and the administrators to start speaking out loudly against that type of prejudice. Some have been to the forefront in condemnation, but too many others have been mealy-mouthed.
	Finally, I call on our Government. I would like them to seize this moment and introduce a bold initiative that could bring hope to all. Many of our universities lead the world, particularly in science and technology. As part of our country's contribution to the Middle East peace process, why do we not launch a British-sponsored international science and technology initiative? There could be a programme designed to encourage our universities to collaborate in joint regional projects with Israeli, Palestinian and other Arab academic centres. Studies could be conducted based on water technology, water-borne diseases, desert agriculture and environmental issues; and why not even archaeology?
	It would benefit the Arabs and the Israelis, and it is something that our universities could do so well. But it cannot happen without a Government initiative. What better and more practical way could there be to make a positive and lasting contribution towards peace and understanding in this deeply divided area than for us to take such a bold and positive step?

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: My Lords, it is striking to think about those things that the AUT has done. My perception is that there is remarkably little support for its position within UK universities. To return to the theme of this debate, we have heard two notable maiden speeches. I particularly welcome the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and also the work that he is doing. I know how much he knows about schools and education. It is splendid to have someone to speak here on those subjects who brings all that knowledge.
	The Government have committed themselves, and thereby us, to a large package of legislation on education, health and social affairs. The list has been rehearsed by a number of noble Lords. It is rather striking, given that it is only a part of the legislative programme set out in the Queen's Speech; namely, education, housing benefit, health improvement and protection, incapacity benefit, mental health, protecting vulnerable groups and parental rights. Then, of course, there is the NHS redress Bill, and one wonders whether it will be compatible with the compensation Bill that is to build the compensation culture down, or the corporate manslaughter Bill, which one suspects will build the compensation culture up. Are the latter two Bills compatible with one another? We shall see—there is much to look forward to.
	On Monday, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay of St Johns, remarked that the Home Office and the Department for Constitutional Affairs were to bring forward a,
	"veritable blizzard of Bills".—[Official Report, 23/5/05; col. 246.]
	I fear that the stormy weather is spreading across departments and across the legislative landscape.
	The noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, who is not in his place, in a notable speech whose forebodings I share, argued on Monday that we are in danger as a Parliament of mistaking quantity for quality of legislation. He noted—the statistics are striking—that in 2003 we,
	"passed 13,407 pages of new law—4,073 pages of Acts, 9,334 for subsidiary legislation. That represents between 8,000 and 9,000 pages of net additional new law".—[Official Report, 23/5/05; col. 324.]
	I begin to wonder whether there is a covert target for pages of legislation emanating from each department of state at work here.
	I believe that the diagnosis of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, of the effects of this tendency, which I shall not quote, is correct. We are legislating too much and we cheerfully enact demands whose complexity defeats not only ordinary citizens, but also many who are supposed to administer the bloated system we impose, including those who work in the public sector and in the areas we are discussing in today's debate. We may arrive at new laws openly, but they have very little chance of becoming known laws, let alone well understood and culturally accepted ones. Too often they are barely comprehensible without expensive professional advice, and sometimes I do not believe they are well understood by the professionals whose advice is sought and relied on. Not all institutions can afford to go to top QCs.
	I offer one illustration, and naturally I have to look to the past for it, but I think the trend we are experiencing can be illustrated in the area of education, social and health legislation by contrasting an Act of 1990 with one from 2004. I offer my apologies to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, for my choice of example. Fifteen years ago, Parliament enacted the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill 1990, a readily comprehensible piece of legislation that has provided good regulation of controversial and developing new fertility treatments, and it is widely admired internationally. Last year, Parliament enacted the Human Tissue Bill 2004 which, despite frantic amendment at every stage, has imposed obscure and ambiguous requirements on all pathology services. Legislation was needed, but the particular legislation that we now have was not what was needed.
	Generalising the point, I believe that an ill-structured or hyper-complex Bill, once it has been introduced, can be improved only to a limited degree by the process of amendment, however conscientiously noble Lords and Members of Parliament in the other place pursue that aim. Noble Lords reasonably objected to the Human Tissue Bill, as it then was, only to be reassured that the Human Tissue Authority, to be established by the Act, would sort the mess out. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who is not in her place, has bravely undertaken the task of chairing that authority. If anyone can neutralise or undo the effects of excessive legislation, I am sure that she can. But do we really need to do things this way, and should we not perhaps take a different tack?
	I offer one gesture towards better possibilities. The Better Regulation Task Force recommended in its March 2005 report entitled Less is More: Reducing Burdens, Improving Outcomes—I like the title—a "one in, one out" rule for regulation whereby each new regulation has to be matched by a deregulatory measure. The Dutch have introduced the idea and there is a certain beauty in directing the techniques of regulation on to regulation itself, even on to legislation—and of course in particular the techniques of targeting against the excesses of the targeting culture.
	Indeed, there might be something to be said for going beyond the "one in, one out" rule. At one time in the Republic of Ireland, those who wished to open a new bar had to buy up not one, but two licences to sell alcohol. There were far too many licensed premises. "One in, two out" was a very good way of reducing the number of bars. I hope that the Government will bear this simple standard in mind when deciding both whether and when the Bills that we are looking at in prospect today should be brought forward.
	I have a set of questions on some of which I hope the Minister may be able to comment in his reply, although I realise that they run broader than the particular proposed legislation. Should consolidating legislation become our default position and aim? Should pre-legislative scrutiny be the default starting point on the journey to the statute book? Should a genuine estimate of the costs of proposed legislation and regulation, for those on the receiving end and not only those in government, be routine and even required? Should post-legislative scrutiny become routine? Should an independent report on the quality of the structure, drafting, implementation and the parliamentary contribution to legislation become a routine matter? We could all benefit from such feedback.
	A speech on these themes should be short, and so I shall stop at this point.

Lord Smith of Leigh: My Lords, we have had a long and wide-ranging debate on many aspects of social policy in the gracious Speech. We have heard two excellent maiden speeches, and I congratulate both of the noble Lords concerned. I am not sure what I or the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, have done to upset the Whips' Office that saw us chosen to come right at the end of the debate, but I confess that I am not a Liverpool fan and so I am not bothered about it.
	I shall concentrate my remarks on education, commenting on some things that were in the gracious Speech and some that were not. As usual, I start by declaring my interest as leader of a local authority. In the past, I have also declared an interest in that my wife was a teacher, but she has now retired. So I have appointed her as my special adviser. Her experience in education over 35 years qualifies her to give of her knowledge and expertise in that field.
	In his introductory speech, my noble friend rightly outlined the achievements of the Labour Government in education. Every school in my authority has received new capital investment, improving the way that schools can be run. Overall performance throughout the authority has improved markedly. Perhaps the greatest legacy—one that my noble friend did not make enough of—is the work on early years education. The Sure Start programme and other initiatives will be a legacy for this country in years to come. They give the fairest start for all during those important and formative years.
	There are some aspects of policy where perhaps the Government, in traditional educational words, could do better. It has come to me through comments made during the debate that we need to recognise that social problems do not begin and end at the school gates. Disadvantaged communities suffer from deprivation, drugs, crime and anti-social behaviour, and those ills do not stay out of school. They affect pupil behaviour and how children learn.
	I apologise to noble Lords, but, because the Minister and other Members on the Front Bench are new, I shall repeat that in my authority, we want to try to understand what is going on. We investigated a difficult estate where we came across, as an example, one 14 year-old lad whose attendance at school was variable. That was partly because he was the only person his drug-using mother would trust to inject her with drugs. How can that child have the kind of start in life that we would all hope for in our own children? Moreover, if disrespect is widespread in a community, of course it will emerge as problems with discipline in school, a problem referred to by several noble Lords.
	Education has always been a partnership between a number of players. Sometimes, without recognising it, the Government seem to have scapegoated some of those partners and not recognised the role that they play. I was pleased to note how my noble friend first outlined his personal debt to teachers and then went on to exemplify that by saying how important teachers were as a profession. That optimism is not widely felt among teachers. They do not feel particularly valued at the moment and sense that they are overworked and undersupported. We need teachers to be working well if we are to drive forward improvements in schools. I hope that we will all work on that.
	Perhaps I did not hear him—if he did mention it, I must apologise—but I do not think that my noble friend referred to the work of local authorities. They have a role as the strategic leaders of their communities to ensure that they can contribute towards improvements in education. In my authority, our local area agreement turns largely on driving up educational standards—and that goes also for the schools that are performing well but could do better.
	I cite a couple of examples of how LEAs have contributed to real and sound improvements. In Knowsley, the authority developed with partners a curriculum for the 14 to 19 year-old age range and saw an 8 per cent improvement in GCSE performance plus a 5 per cent improvement in the rate of staying on beyond 16. Those are remarkable achievements. In Manchester, following the establishment of a multidisciplinary team covering education, social care and health, exclusions have been reduced by 80 per cent. Again, that is a dramatic improvement. Local authorities want to work with the Government in order to achieve their aims. We want to be partners in that work.
	I welcome the contributions on the problem of discipline in schools. If my wife were here, she would say, as a strong and experienced teacher, that she found increasing difficulty in establishing an atmosphere in the classroom in which learning could take place properly. Outside the classroom, there is clear evidence of increased bullying and almost racketeering.
	The worrying trend is that in many cases the parents were not supportive of the teachers but simply believed the version of events relayed to them by their child. The Government are, rightly, giving parents more rights, but parents also have to accept their responsibilities to make sure that they contribute to the learning of not just their own children but others as well.
	I welcome the Secretary of State's establishment last week of the leadership group to look at the issue seriously. I hope that my noble friend will consider whether LEAs may have a part to play, because they have a contribution to make.
	Schools should place discipline right at the top of their agenda. They should make a senior person responsible for discipline in schools and give them the resources to do it. We have heard suggestions in the debate about how that might be done. I do not believe that exclusion is really the solution. It makes it easy for the school to get rid of a child, but it does not resolve the problem for that child and pushes the problem out into the streets and shopping centres. I hasten to add that I do not expect teachers to have to teach disruptive pupils.
	Schools should retain responsibility and funding for those pupils. They can use that funding either to make available alternative provision themselves that will keep these children in education or to work with groups of schools or local authorities to do so. In some cases, transferring a child to a different school is a solution because some of the problems that child has may come from within the school. If that could be agreed by schools, it would be a way forward. Indeed, we had such an agreement in Wigan, but it disappeared when, unfortunately, the Government changed the rules yet again. However, I think that that is a way forward that can work for schools, as well as keeping tabs on children.
	City academies represent a leap of faith for the Government, whose views are usually evidence-based. We do not yet have the relevant evidence about city academies. Are they capable of sustaining improved performance that is not at the expense of other schools in the area? Do they really give us value for money? It is a big investment and it may be a wise one, but are we sure that it is the way forward? Can they be accountable to the local communities they serve? I am an agnostic; I could be convinced, and I am hoping that the evidence can be produced.
	Even if the Government were to carry out their programme, the plan is to have 200 city academies by 2010. That represents 5 per cent of secondary provision in England, Scotland and Wales. What will happen to the other 95 per cent? The danger is that, if we concentrate all our energies and efforts on city academies, the other secondary schools will feel excluded. If we are to raise attainment, what happens in 95 per cent of schools is important.
	I hope that my noble friend will recognise that we have not yet addressed the gender imbalance in performance in schools. The performance of girls is outstripping that of boys at GCSE, and staying-on rates are different, certainly in the area that I represent. That will be a problem if we are to compete in the highest way in the future.
	It is clear that education remains, rightly, a priority for the Labour Government. We are fortunate in having such a capable and knowledgeable Minister in this House to push the Bills through. I am sure that he will acknowledge that he has more to learn. As part of his learning experience—I note that he referred to his own background—I would be delighted to invite him to Wigan to see education outside London. The issues and problems are not always the same. I am sure that he will have a good experience.

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: My Lords, I am very happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with my colleague, propping up the end of a long list of speakers, but I hope that he will indulge me for two or three minutes longer.
	I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord De Mauley and Lord Adonis, on their maiden speeches. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, on his ministerial appointment. I assure him that in my limited experience, he has taken part in a debate that is not simply wide-ranging and interesting but unique. I have never heard two mobile phones go off in one debate in this House before.
	I must presume that the noble Lord was excused the usual advice to those delivering maiden speeches, "Do not be controversial". For how, if we do our job, can he, a Minister, not provoke controversy? Just to show that he did and that the seeds of controversy were there in his speech, I shall begin by asking two questions, one in relation to his remarks on school discipline.
	I was pleased to hear the noble Lord affirm very clearly, echoing the remarks of his Secretary of State in another place, the commitment of the Government to helping in all possible ways head teachers and schools in dealing with the problems of discipline. In that context, there might well be a reply by the end of the debate to the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, about the Government's views on the regularity with which decisions by head teachers to exclude are turned down on appeal. I am not denying that sometimes the appeal will be correct. However, if there is a regular pattern here it would be at least appropriate for the Government to reassure us that they will look at this and see that the right thing is being done.
	I was very pleased to hear the emphasis placed on parents in the noble Lord's speech. I also support and endorse the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on this. But one specific question puzzles me. We want to support parents through the educational system—rightly so. That is marvellous. Equally, we want them to have respect from their children. But we are seeing an increasing practice in schools of there being available to very young children, sometimes 12 and 13 years old, advice of a contraceptive nature, either before or the morning after the event. The advice is not given with parents present, but in their absence. It is given quite deliberately in their absence. Sometimes, that may be essential, but it should not be a regular practice. A major breakdown is taking place if that has to be the rule.
	How does such a practice endorse the respect that we expect children to have for their parents? I know that there are two sides to this question. I am not suggesting that there is a single view which we can follow through, but there is a real issue here. If children of the age of 12 and 13 are being advised deliberately in their parents' absence, that does not inculcate respect and proper family relationships.
	However, on a more positive note, during the past few years—I would say up to 15 years, over successive administrations—there has been a significant advance in education in our schools. I am pleased that this has happened. It has taken place across more than one administration. There are many areas of improvement that one could talk about; I shall mention just two. One has taken place in primary schools; the other has taken place in the development of post-school leaving opportunities.
	On the latter, I shall restrict myself to saying that I was pleased to hear the Minister suggest—the implications are important—that further education has to be a point of focus and interest in this area. I come from higher education; that is where I made a living. But further education ought now to be a proper focus of pretty detailed scrutiny, attention and support.
	I turn to primary schools, which have seen real improvements. Those have been shown in all sorts of contexts—in terms of ability and standards reached. There are many things yet to be done and many areas in which we could improve further, but these improvements have been a result of government policies. The policies include a national curriculum, a national testing system, a national inspection system and the provision of enhanced opportunities for pre-school education.
	I have spoken to a number of head teachers of primary schools. They say that one of the most important factors in the development of attainment in their schools, and in dealing with behaviour issues and problems, has been the opportunity to welcome children into the school context before formal education begins at the age of five. This has had a huge impact, and it is much to the credit of the Government that they have invested in it. These are some of the mechanisms. Additional investment has gone alongside them, which is a good and proper thing.
	The drivers of these changes have been a focus on achieving national standards and a national declaration of attainment. All of that is good, but it has had certain consequences that perhaps are unintended. Those include more control from the centre. Reference was made in the previous speech to the impact of local authorities. If too much control is taken to the centre, perhaps remoteness develops. One sign of that is a possible over-emphasis on targets.
	Targets have had their role. They have had a very important part to play. Unless parents know what children should reasonably be expected to do at the ages of seven, 11 and 14, they cannot assess whether children are being well served in a school. Targets are important. However, they risk having some unintended consequences. One of them is increased bureaucracy. I was pleased to hear in the gracious Speech that an attempt will be made to lighten that.
	But a more insidious consequence, because it is less obvious, is an approach where one size is increasingly deemed to fit all. If you think that you can solve educational problems by setting targets, it can lead to the assumption that there is a single way of proceeding; that there is one size for improving schools and that it will fit every school. But one size does not fit all. Schools are different—often very different.
	One attempt at a one-size-fits-all solution that is often favoured by the education profession is a focus only on class size. That is a mistake. Class size is important, but it is not the be all and end all. I shall return to that point in a moment. Among the differences that one finds in schools is a difference in size. There is a difference in geography. Some schools are in Wigan; some are in central London; some are in Cumbria; some are in Dorset; some are in far Cornwall. Each school will have its own character, partly as a result of that geography. Talking about co-operation between schools is fine if they happen to be in adjacent parts of a city, but if they are two counties apart, or at least 15 miles, it is a different matter.
	Therefore, there are differences in size between schools, differences in geography, differences in environment—again, we have heard some graphic examples of that—and differences in population. How many languages other than English are spoken in pupils' homes, in which those pupils spend the large part of their lives? There are differences in attainments. Some children entering school do not have any—this is where the pre-school effort is so important—background of looking at books. A book is a foreign object to them, unseen before entering school. In some very sad cases children are not used to holding conversations with people; their parents do not talk to them. This emerges when talking with teachers and head teachers and when visiting schools. It is part of the reality. There are huge differences in the make-up of school populations. There are differences in attainment, differences in what pupils bring to the school and, inevitably, differences in outcome.
	A policy for improving standards, which we would all endorse, has to take account of differences as well as similarities and be focused more broadly than simply on a single set of targets. My proposal is to move at a pace we can manage from the one-size-fits-all approach towards a system whereby each school should have the luxury of support to devise a school plan which is a bid for funds. That is the luxury which the city academies will have. Their head teachers and heads of section will be supported to devise a plan that will work well for that school because the single target and the single one-size-fits-all approach does not meet the needs of individual schools.
	If such a plan were devised with the encouragement and support of the local authority, the local authority would to some extent be held responsible for funding it, and for the quality of the plan, and may even be assessed by Ofsted on the quality of its input into the school planning system. The plan would be something against which schools were inspected rather than simply on sets of national targets. However, I know that Ofsted's inspections comprise more than that and I pay tribute to it. If a school were assessed on its plan to deal with its particular environment and its particular catchment, it is much more likely that the involvement of the school in developing new ways of dealing with problems which, frankly, we cannot deal with from the centre would be real and significant. If there is a role for city academies—and the jury is out on that—that is what they can achieve. We need to roll that out—as the expression goes—to a much wider range of schools.
	When noble Lords on other Benches were perhaps supporting candidates in the general election, as a decent Cross-Bencher I was at home preparing for future work in the House of Lords. One of the things that I did was to read in some detail the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation by area. In reading that, one of the things you discover is that educational deprivation is found in the same groups and in the same areas as deprivation in housing, in employment, in income, in health and in life expectancy. The folks that you meet at each two stops of the Jubilee Line going east have a lower life expectancy. Things are as different as that by area. Schools are in areas. I plead for the Government to take account—I hope that the Minister will take this up—of that area focus in the interests of schools and to begin to evaluate schools and to fund them on the basis of the plans they have to deal with the problems in their locality.

Baroness Barker: My Lords, it is a real privilege to begin to sum up at the end of this debate. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Adonis and Lord De Mauley, for two excellent maiden speeches that not only showed us what they will contribute to the House in the future but, together with the speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth, gave me what I always need on these occasions and never have; that is, a theme. That is what one needs on an occasion such as this.
	The theme that they gave to me was diversity and community. The ways in which they talked about their backgrounds and the way in which the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, talked about older people, several hours ago sparked some thoughts that have run all the way through this afternoon's many and varied contributions. I thank them all very much for that.
	I also welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, back to the Front Bench. In his previous incarnation as health Minister one of the achievements of which he and I were most proud was the Adoption and Children Act. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, should also be proud of it—I refer to his former role as spokesman on children and families—even if he is not. There was a bit of unfinished business with that Act; that is, inter-country adoption and private fostering. I am very pleased to see in the Queen's Speech that that matter is back on the agenda.
	I hope that I may offer the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, a bit of advice or let him into a secret. The DWP team on these Benches has a performance target. If you can rattle the DWP Minister as much as did the red haired Baroness who used to sit on the Benches behind them, who knew as much about pensions as they do, you are doing terribly well. That was something which we used to watch when Lady Castle was in the House. I mention it in passing to the noble Lord.
	Diversity and community are the two themes that have run through most of the contributions that have been made today. I want to start by going back to what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth said about schools. I listened to his description of a good faith school and I agreed with it wholeheartedly. From what he said, I took it that the most important part was that a faith school has to be within a community and be reflective of it.
	However, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley said, we on these Benches have grave doubts about city academies. One of the main reasons for that can be summed up in two words—Emmanuel College. For those of your Lordships who do not know, Emmanuel College is a city academy in the Newcastle area, run and funded by a private sponsor, which prides itself on teaching, among other subjects, creationism. I find it most alarming that children should be subjected to that very narrow interpretation of faith. Were I in charge of the curriculum in that part of the world, I think that I would obtain a bulk order of "Inherit the Wind", starring Spencer Tracey, and make it compulsory viewing. Interestingly, it is a school that has an extremely high level of exclusions—more than other schools in its area. It seems to me that the danger with city academies is that if they are outwith their communities and outwith the rest of the healthcare planning systems, they risk becoming very narrowly inward and introspective institutions, which I would not wish children to attend.
	For many members of your Lordships' House, this is a very rare chance that we have to debate legislation in the light of what people have said to us on the doorstep. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, many of us were out on the doorstep recently. For me, the key moment in the election campaign was the Prime Minister's look of complete incomprehension when Diana Church asked him about the system of booking an appointment at her local GP surgery, where, in order to ensure compliance with the 48-hour rule for making appointments, pre-booked appointments have disappeared entirely. That the Prime Minister did not know what an individual GP practice does is not remarkable. That, of course, is how it should be, because booking systems should be decided by practices locally to meet the needs of their client groups. But that the Prime Minister did not know the consequences of a policy determined and centrally imposed by the Department of Health is, quite rightly, the subject of disparaging comment.
	Throughout the campaign, we Liberal Democrats put our case that management and planning of both the health service and the education service is best done most effectively at local level. I believe that the eloquent remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, about having area focuses for public services were absolutely right, and I echo them.
	During the election, I kept coming across the unintended consequences of centralised target setting. As a consequence of the out-of-hours contract, the GPs in the north-east have subcontracted emergency out-of-hours services to a GP who arrives every weekend from Germany. They are the same GPs who have outside their surgery doors at 8.30 in the morning ever-lengthening queues of people who have deferred presenting themselves for treatment until they could talk to their own GPs. From talking to the nurses involved in that system, it was quite clear that the lack of records and the doctors' lack of knowledge of the patients had led to an overall poorer quality of service. The people who lost out most were the elderly—people who did not have very much wrong with them but who needed some reassurance and support to regain their confidence and get back on to their feet.
	I wish that I could adequately convey the anguish of the carers that I met in Bradford. Their foundation hospital is £11 million in debt, and as a cost-cutting measure some bright spark decided that they would stop carers using non-emergency patient transport. The consequence is that every two weeks elderly people with Alzheimer's are dropped at the hospital door by the driver where they have to wait until their carers, who are equally elderly, can get there using taxis at their own expense. Anyone who doubts that centralised political targets are inefficient and ineffective and simply serve to distort medical care should spend an afternoon canvassing; they will have their illusions shattered.
	I thank the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, for telling us from which of the two manifestos he was quoting; it was not immediately apparent on the substance alone. I say to him and to the Minister that I went from the West Country up to the Border in Scotland, and not once was the word "choice" mentioned by anyone. People do not want choice in the sense in which it has been presented to us; they wanted services that were local to them, that were adequate, that were safe, that had standards that they could trust and that were free. Anyone who did spend much time on the doorsteps during the election will have one phrase ringing in their ears: "I am not a racist, but . . .". As a consequence, perhaps unintended, of the campaign run by some people in the election, some electors felt that they had permission to speak about immigration in an opinionated fashion. I say opinionated because there were precious few facts around. Time and again I heard claims about immigration that simply could not be true. High on the list were absolutely fantastic claims about people coming to this country to abuse the services of the NHS. While it is true that a minority of people will always exploit public services, there is as yet little evidence of systematic or widespread abuse. I therefore hope that the plans, which we are told are on the way, to tighten up entitlements to NHS care are based on sound evidence and not on a knee-jerk reaction to what was a shabby campaign.
	I hope that as responsible politicians—as Members of your Lordships' House unquestionably are—our response to what we have heard in the past few weeks will be to celebrate the distinguished and dedicated contribution that people from other countries have made to the NHS ever since its inception. I hope that your Lordships will say loud and clear that immigration has been to the health and benefit of all citizens of this country. We are proud of that, and we will not be ashamed of it.
	I note that part of the health improvement Bill will seek to modernise community pharmacy and ophthalmic services. We welcome the recognition that those are some of the most valuable health services, again not least because they are often rooted in communities. I have often talked to older people whose first language is not English whose reliance on pharmacists, particularly those who have their language skills, has been immensely important to them not only in health promotion but in assisting them with the management of long-term chronic conditions. I hope that in that case modernisation will not turn out to be strangulation by regulation.
	Other noble Lords in this debate have spoken about MRSA, and I take the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Chan, as being some of the best that we have heard on the subject. We have heard from the gracious Speech that a Bill will be brought forward to support patients who wish to seek redress should they experience problems with their healthcare. The reform of clinical negligence systems should follow the proposals made in the Chief Medical Officer's report, Making Amends, and will be welcome. We will study with great care the proposal for an NHS litigation authority to oversee a scheme and manage compensation. However, given the Government's love of all things American and their increasingly bold moves towards private methods of healthcare delivery, we on these Benches will resist anything that fosters a compensation culture in the NHS or anything that prevents practitioners from undertaking procedures that they believe to be right but which contain great risk.
	I believe that it is in the best interests of patients that bad practice should be uncovered in the NHS. I remind Members of your Lordships' House that my colleagues in another place, such as Nick Harvey, the MP for North Devon, have been instrumental in uncovering bad practice in the NHS, such as the Bristol paediatric surgery scandal.
	To uncover bad practice and enable individuals to seek explanations and answers and bring about justice for themselves and others is one thing, but to soften up the NHS as easy prey for insurance companies is another. We on these Benches will be watchful for anything that smacks of that.
	The Prime Minister famously said that he was listening. The new Health Minister does not seem to have the same disposition. Her first announcement that she is going to provide further investment in the private sector against the advice of many health bodies, including the BMA, speaks volumes.
	It is one thing to enable private providers to pick off the operations that are cheaper to perform and the patients who get better quicker and are therefore cheaper and require less rehabilitation, but it is wrong to deny the NHS something extremely important—the opportunity for people in the NHS to gain skills, particularly in surgery, by carrying out less complex work. Given that it covers only elective surgery and not the complex, difficult and unsexy stuff in which the private sector is not interested, I question the Government's approach.
	During the gracious Speech, one word made me sit straight up: the use of the word "compulsory" in relation to mental health treatment. I had the privilege of being a member of the Joint Scrutiny Committee that considered the draft Mental Health Bill under the expert chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Carlile. I am extremely glad that I did: it was an immensely interesting experience. We received 450 written submissions; 124 carers and service users came as witnesses; and we made 107 recommendations, of which 30 were about the rights of, and safeguards for, patients, carers and their relatives. We produced a report of which I am holding but one of three volumes. It was an extremely thorough scrutiny. What was remarkable about it was the degree of unanimity across parties at the end of that long process.
	The committee came out with a statement that I will draw to your Lordships' attention:
	"We accept the merits of having a broad definition of mental disorder, but the Bill needs to have clear exclusions ensuring that the legislation cannot be inappropriately used as a means of social control. A broad definition of mental disorder also necessitates that the conditions on the issue of compulsion are tightly drawn. We have recommended a range of changes that would tighten the conditions and ensure that this legislation cannot be used inappropriately. In particular, we have proposed that the threshold for risk of harm to others should be raised and that compulsion should only be used where a treatment is available which would be of therapeutic benefit to the patient".
	We also said that the Bill needs to be significantly rewritten. Everyone accepts that the 1983 legislation is largely out of date. What we did not accept was what was placed in front of us. We wished to see a Bill that contained principles, rather than them being left to a code of practice, and a Bill for which there had been far more extensive thinking about the level of resources that would be needed to implement it. The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, talked about the CAMHS service and the great strain that it is under. We could see that only being exacerbated in the future.
	We scrutinised the Bill for more than six months. It had only two friends in the world—the Home Office and the King's Fund. When the Home Office starts making health policy, you had better beware. Having sat through pretty well all the debates on it, I have to say that, if the scrutiny had been a boxing match carried out under the Marquis of Queensbury rules, it would have stopped long before it did.
	Out there are many thousands of people who have mental illness and many hundreds of people who work with them. They are deeply fearful of what is in that draft Bill—a Bill that is a reaction to one or two limited incidents and that would criminalise thousands of people who live successfully in the community. It is our job in this House to make sure that the Bill, whenever it comes to us, is radically different from that presented to us.
	Much has been said about this being an historic third term for the Labour Government. I ask them to make it historic by acknowledging that, in healthcare, the national service frameworks have driven up standards and made a difference because they have provided evidence bases and a means for local people to engage with experts. As many speakers, such as the noble Baronesses, Lady Sharp and Lady Jay of Paddington, have said, when the Government look at the experience of the legislation that they have already passed, they will see that we will have delivery only when we start to enable local decisions to be made.

Earl Howe: My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in a debate of such high quality. I join others in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to this House and to his portfolio. I do so very warmly and hope that he will find his new position to be agreeable and rewarding. I am sure that, as a freshly appointed Minister in a department that he knows well, he does not need anyone's sympathy, least of all mine. However, I never envy anyone who is called on to make their maiden speech from the government Dispatch Box. That he did so with such surefootedness and charm is a marker, I am sure, of the future success that we all wish for him.
	As so often occurs after the gracious Speech, this has been a debate of considerable breadth as well as depth. If the Minister had any fears that the House might prove reticent in providing him with advice, I am sure that they have been comprehensively dispelled. I cannot be alone in discerning a happy fit between the eloquent emphasis of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, on education as the route to good citizenship; what the right reverend Prelate had to say about mutual respect between children and teachers; the sensitive and wise remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, on encouraging sport in schools; the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on parenting; and the theme taken up by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, on how to promote the self-respect and achievement of looked-after children. I think too of what my noble friend Lady Morris said about families and the social benefits of young people's clubs; the excellent speech of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, about school discipline; the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, on Mossbourne Community Academy; and the noble Lord, Lord Smith, who used the example of Wigan to point out wider and thought-provoking messages on the general theme of education.
	Lying close to that was another theme—universal opportunity and social justice, whether it was my noble friend Lord Blackwell on choice in public services; the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, on pensions for women; the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, on independent living for the disabled; the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, on incentivising private pension provision; or what the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, said about the needs of the elderly.
	I think, too, of the persuasive and considered maiden speech of my noble friend Lord De Mauley, who spoke about flexibility in the age of retirement. Every contribution, including those that I have not had time to mention, did great credit to the opening debate of this Parliament.
	The noble Lord, Lord Warner, cannot have failed to notice that since we last faced each other across the Chamber something has not happened: he and I have not changed places. As we are all aware, the Government have been returned by the electors with a sizeable majority. Therefore, if the noble Lord feels inclined to indulge in a spot of sunbathing in the glow of electoral victory—metaphorically speaking—I am sure that we would concede that he has a reasonable excuse for doing so on this occasion.
	On behalf of these Benches, I congratulate the noble Lord on his appointment as Minister of State in the Department of Health and wish him well in that exciting but demanding post. I understand that one of the noble Lord's departmental responsibilities is NHS delivery. The gracious Speech contained some undertakings that fall squarely into that category. Until we see the Bills, it is difficult to offer a sensible comment about any of them, but I want to make special mention of the long-promised mental health Bill. For me—and for many others, I suspect—the litmus test of the Bill will be the extent to which it promotes better patient care and the greater involvement of patients in their own care. It must be about reducing the stigma of mental illness. It must point the way to a lessening of social exclusion. Perhaps the most regrettable feature of the entire gracious Speech was the way in which the Bill was described:
	"legislation to provide a new framework for the provision of compulsory treatment of those with mental disorders".
	If that is how Ministers conceptualise the mental health Bill, heaven help us.
	A very small number of mentally ill individuals pose a risk to others. To allow considerations of risk to dominate our thinking in this area would be a great mistake. Compulsory treatment must have its place, but to over-emphasise it is likely to prove counter-productive. It will certainly do no good to the way in which the users of mental health services are perceived by the public.
	We shall look constructively at the measures designed to rationalise the number of arm's length bodies. One proposal with which I disagree is the proposed merger of the Health Care Commission and CSCI. We supported the creation of those bodies as separate bodies, and we believe that both have started out well. It is a mistake to disrupt the work that they have begun for the sake of a banner headline—to put it at its crudest—about how many quangos have been abolished. If the Government felt able to rethink their decision on the issue, many would thank them for doing so.
	Over the crest of the hill, the health improvement and protection Bill is approaching to give us better hospital hygiene. I hope that it does so. Legislating for better hygiene after all the initiatives, campaigns and charters that have been launched over the past five years looks very much like the last chance saloon. We shall judge the Bill on its merits, but I wish that we were looking at something more imaginative instead of more sticks with which to beat the health service—much less of a culture of fear; more freedom; transparency of information for patients; and greater incentives to do well. The Royal College of Nursing has pointed the way with its list of minimum standards. There is no need to legislate to give those standards a central place in hospital management.
	The Bills laid before Parliament in the coming Session need to be viewed against the backdrop of what the gracious Speech referred to as,
	"the introduction of more choice and diversity in healthcare".
	We are entering some very interesting waters. Since 1997, the Government have made some useful inroads into the numbers on in-patient waiting lists, as well as into the mean waiting time experienced by patients on those lists. These improvements are, of course, very much to be welcomed. Part of the improvement since 2001 has been directly attributable to the greater use by the NHS of the private sector. I, for one, have no difficulty at all with that. Indeed, it is a policy that we urged the Government to adopt much sooner than they did.
	Equally, when the new Secretary of State, Patricia Hewitt, took office 10 days ago and announced that over the next five years another 1.7 million NHS operations are to take place in the private sector, I viewed that policy as being absolutely correct in principle. The principle is that where there is a specialist unit delivering treatments faster and more efficiently than an NHS provider, and to at least an equal standard of quality, it has to be good news for patients. We have seen the results of that approach most graphically in London where services to heart patients have been transformed and cardiac waiting lists have almost disappeared.
	But no initiative of this sort comes without risk. The Minister does not need me to tell him that the risks here are potentially quite significant. The increased use of the private sector is being rolled out in parallel with the financial reimbursement system known as payment by results. In ordinary language, that means that in order to pay for treatment the NHS money follows the patient wherever he goes. If one allows greater patient choice in healthcare, payment by results is a necessary accompaniment to that policy.
	The difficulty arises from how the policy is operated. The price charged for an episode of treatment is known as "the tariff". In many instances, the tariff is calculated on the basis of an average level of time needed to treat the patient and an average level of complexity. What many people fear is that independent treatment centres will take on most of the easier and more straightforward cases, leaving acute trusts to treat those patients who require greater time and who have greater co-morbidity. If the tariff system is not sufficiently sensitive to allow for case mix or for the difficulty of particular cases, acute trusts will find that the reimbursement they receive does not, on average, cover their costs. That is what some trusts report is now happening.
	In principle, there is everything to recommend a market-based approach that sorts out the successful providers of care from the less successful and which incentivises the health service to sharpen up its act. But the playing field needs to be level at the outset. We have to beware of unfairly handicapping the NHS while unreasonably favouring independent providers. An independent provider typically receives more money than an NHS trust for performing an identical procedure, in many cases up to 25 per cent more. On top of that, the tariff paid to the NHS does not reflect the cost of teaching and training or PFI payments. I am sure that the Government can produce all sorts of arguments for these disparities, but when we read in this week's press that the second wave of independent treatment centres is to be paid for a guaranteed volume of operations, regardless of whether patients are actually treated or not, it seems to me that we should question, if nothing else, the business case for that approach.
	It is to the Government's credit that they are confronting head-on the possibility that some NHS hospitals may have to close if they cannot compete. That kind of contingency work needs to be done. But if a hospital were to close not so much through its own failings as because of a tariff system that is relatively crude and that featherbeds private providers, it would be deeply unfortunate.
	Some foundation trusts are centres of tertiary excellence. There is a real fear that, at the moment, tertiary procedures that are low-volume but high-cost are not adequately reimbursed. The implications of that for the provision of specialist services are serious. In economic terms, the margins of safety in healthcare are thin. Once you get a hospital which is losing money on its specialist services, and which also finds that its routine caseload is migrating across to a nearby independent provider, you rapidly start heading towards an operating deficit. A modern acute trust has a high base of fixed costs that cannot easily be ratcheted downwards to cope with a fall in volume.
	The NHS already has to contend with the financial shocks associated with Agenda for Change and the new consultants' contract, not to mention the emerging competition from GPs under practice-based commission. To introduce payment by results across the board in the secondary and tertiary care sectors, without first being sure that the tariff system is sophisticated enough to cope with it, would be to risk destabilising the NHS in a way that would be as serious as it would be unnecessary.
	I do not criticise the direction of travel adopted by the Government; indeed, I firmly support it, which is why I hope the Minister will take it in good part if I say that his department would do well to examine the pitfalls experienced by other countries in the whole area of fee-for-service, as well as the difficulties currently being experienced by some of our new foundation trusts. The rolling-out of payment by results on a broader front needs to happen, but in a way that minimises the risks of unintended consequences.
	As we move into this new Parliament, the noble Lord will know that the opposition he encounters on these Benches will remain constructive. Of course, that does not preclude firm resistance to proposals that we consider may not have been properly thought through. The strength of this House, however, is its ability to look at issues dispassionately, to debate without unnecessary party rancour, and, at its best, to unite across party boundaries to achieve an outcome that is right and just. I have every confidence that we shall continue to see that strength come to the fore to the benefit of the legislation placed before us, and to the wider benefit of the men, women and children of this country.

Lord Warner: My Lords, we have had a wide-ranging and well informed debate this afternoon and evening, which sets the scene for the detailed work on some of the important Bills that we will be considering this Session. As others have said, we have heard some most thoughtful maiden speeches. I for one hope that the speech on pensions from the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, will be the first of many that we will hear from him on that particularly important issue. We can guarantee that the House will hear many more speeches from my noble friend Lord Adonis, whose excellent maiden speech combined inside knowledge, if I may put it that way, self-deprecation and a strong philosophical context.
	I begin by mentioning two Bills that my noble friend did not have time to cover: the National Lottery Bill that was introduced in the previous Session, but did not receive a Second Reading, and a possible London Olympics Bill. The first of these establishes the big lottery fund with a new single good cause for charities, health, education and the environment. This replaces the three existing distributors, and will deliver £6 million to £12 million a year of administrative savings to add to the funds already available for good causes.
	I hope everyone here will be delighted if the Government have to introduce a Bill for the London Olympics in 2012. There are now just 42 days until the 2012 host city election in Singapore. There is a real sense that London can win the race, particularly with the public and cross-party support that the London bid has received. I am sure all noble Lords hope that our colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Coe, can produce one of his trademark last-minute sprints to achieve the outcome many of us would like to see. If he does, we will introduce a Bill to set up an Olympic delivery authority that will manage the public money to be used, grant the Mayor of London an Olympic-specific power to fulfil his obligations to prepare and stage the Games, and ensure that we can meet the commitments in the London bid.
	I should now like to respond to some—I fear that I shall not be able to respond to all—points raised in the debate. Before doing so, however, I would like to take the opportunity to correct factually the personal attack that was made on me yesterday in another place by the Conservative Front Bench health spokesman Andrew Lansley over healthcare acquired infections, which is a subject relevant to this debate. He said:
	"It is particularly surprising that it is the Minister who showed a conspicuous failure to act on health care-acquired infections in the course of the last Parliament who now, ironically, is to be in charge of NHS delivery".—[Official Report, Commons, 25/05/05; col. 561 ]
	I have to tell noble Lords—and I hope that the honourable gentleman will read this—that the facts are that I joined the health team in June 2003. The Health Protection Agency's surveillance data on MRSA for the period April to September 2004 showed a drop of just over 6 per cent compared with April to September 2003. That is a strange way of not making an impact.
	The Government have taken a wide range of measures to tackle MRSA. Strategies include mandatory surveillance, which was not in place before, a national hand hygiene campaign and, as has been noted already, there will be hygiene provisions in the Health Improvement and Protection Bill, unlike the previous system, under which MRSA rose from 4 per cent to 30 per cent of staphylococcus aureus infections between 1993 and 1997. But we know that arithmetic is not always a strong point on the Conservative Front Bench in another place—except in the case of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, who is always impeccable in his researches on data.
	Perhaps I may say to the noble Earl that I shall not be going in for too much sunbathing. It is of course frowned upon by health Ministers.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, raised a number of points. I cannot respond to them all. On the issue about whether heads have enough authority in relation to exclusions, they can remove pupils from schools, but there is an appeals process. We have not heard from heads that they wish to change this appeals process, although no doubt the new commission will be looking at that in terms of discipline. It is always a risk that without the appeal process heads could be challenged in courts.
	The noble Baroness raised the subject of truancy. The facts are that—again I have to correct something—that attendance is at record levels—since September, 34,000 more pupils regularly attend every day. That is 87,000 more than in 1997. Truancy and unauthorised absence have remained essentially unchanged for 10 years. So that situation is not getting worse and, indeed, regular attendance is getting better.
	A number of noble Lords raised issues on city academies. The evidence is that they have been a success. I certainly welcome the support from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth and the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell. The Church of England has become a major provider in these academies. It is worth bearing in mind—I draw this to the attention of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley—that in 2003 the average five-plus A* to C GCSE results in the first three open academies were 24 per cent, compared to an average of 16 per cent in their predecessor schools, and in 2004 academies achieved close to 30 per cent, outstripping the national average. That seems to suggest a measure of success.
	My noble friend Lady Jay raised the issue of assisted dying. I shall resist the temptation to go too much into that area. Your Lordships will consider the matter when it returns to this House. I recognise her thoughtful remarks, but I also recognise the strong views expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, in this particular area, and I hope they will both understand that it would not be appropriate for me at this point to make any comments on those particular Bills.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, asked why there was no youth justice Bill. I am advised that there will be one and that not all legislation was referred to in the Queen's Speech. The noble Baroness also asked whether there would be practitioners on the new working party commission on discipline. The group will include 12 practitioners with experience in the area.
	The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, talked about value-added measures. The Government accept the use of those measures but recognise the need for improving the performance of lower achievers. We will look at all ideas for catch-up.
	The contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, is very welcome. The Government share his concern to strengthen sport in school. However, the Government's report entitled Choosing activity: a physical activity action plan, published last November, highlighted that many women and girls often prefer other kinds of physical activity, such as aerobics, dance or self-defence, to sport. It is a question of finding what people want to help to engage them in more physical activity.
	There were well thought-out, well informed, constructive contributions on pensions from the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, my noble friend Lady Hollis, and the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, in his maiden speech. I am sure that my noble friend Lord Hunt has been assiduously listening and taking notes on those contributions. I, too, pay tribute to the work of my noble friend Lady Hollis. I shall not even attempt to respond in detail to her points. Although we agree with her on the position of previous generations of women, I gently say to her that in future there will be less difference in the way that men and women accrue state pensions. The position of current and future generations of women in this regard has changed, but that does not invalidate many of my noble friend's important points. All these contributions have provoked my immense sympathy for Adair Turner, given the problems that he must try to tackle.
	I am grateful for the support of the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell. There are plenty of spaces on this side of the House if he wants to join us. The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, talked about visa charges for overseas students. My understanding is that UKvisa is required to meet the full cost of providing visa services from those who use the service. The amount charged is a matter for UKvisa.
	The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, made important points about deprived children. No official decision has yet been taken on whether a new statutory duty for youth provision will be placed on local authorities.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about spending on the family resolution pilot project. The figures are not quite as she adduced: the pilot has a budget of only £300,000, not the £1 million that she said, and so far there have been 43 referrals to the pilot, not the six that she mentioned.
	The noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, made his usual constructive contributions on dentistry. I cannot respond to all of them. He chided us for not being radical enough, but I thought that we had been pretty radical in setting up a new personal dental services contract. Over 25 per cent of dentists have now adopted that new way of working. I understand his concerns about oral health among children, but, according to my information, 12 year-old children in the UK have the best oral health in Europe. We recognise that there are serious dental access problems in certain hotspots—the south west, Yorkshire, Cumbria, Shropshire and parts of the north west. However, 68 Polish dentists are already working in England and 45 more will arrive at the end of May. Some 170 graduates will come out soon from the expanded undergraduate places that we have provided. There is a lot of giggling from the other side, but, as I remember, they closed two dental schools in 1992.
	The noble Lord, Lord Chan, made a number of important points. We recognise that MRSA is a complicated issue, but it has to be tackled. In big tertiary care centres, such as Guy's and St Thomas', we have seen huge improvements when they have tackled the problem seriously with everyone getting behind it. We are trying to ensure that those who have been a little more laggardly can achieve the best practice.
	The noble Lord asked about preparation for a flu pandemic. We have about 100,000 anti-viral doses available, with some others around the NHS. We are working according to the plan drawn up by the Chief Medical Officer to build stocks of about 1.4 million doses over the next year to 18 months.
	My noble friend Lord Rosser made an important speech on discipline and respect in schools. For the troublesome pupils we have doubled the number of places in pupil referral units and have made the programmes full-time. We do not think that that is the total solution, but it has made a contribution.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and others asked about the evidence on the performance of the pilot academies. We will be publishing the latest PricewaterhouseCoopers evaluation of academies shortly. We will make a full statement about how we intend to proceed. I hope that that reassures the noble Baroness and others who were a bit sceptical about that issue.
	My noble friend Lady Wilkins raised the important issue of independent living for people with disabilities. The Government fully support the spirit of what she said. She mentioned our Green Paper, Independence, Well-being and Choice, which will give people who need social care the opportunity to make decisions about how they lead their lives. That, along with the Strategy Unit report that my noble friend mentioned, will be an important part of taking forward the reform of services outside hospitals. We will be publishing a White Paper after widespread consultation on those services outside hospitals later this year.
	A number of noble Lords have concerns about the mental health Bill. I can best say that our current position is that we are studying very carefully the prelegislative scrutiny committee's report. We will publish a response to that in the summer. I would encourage people to wait to see that report. Any Bill that is introduced will not be introduced until after that consideration is complete and our response is in the public arena.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, and the noble Earl, Lord Howe, raised the merger of the Healthcare Commission and the Commission for Social Care Inspection. I am sure that they will remind me from time to time of some sterling speeches that I made on that subject in the Health and Social Care Act proceedings. All I would pray in aid is that some of those speeches were made at about 4 am.
	However, despite the remarks that were made, there is an important issue on how we strike the right balance between social care and healthcare in the way in which we provide services and support to people. If we are absolutely honest—I can say this, having spent six years running a big social services department—one sometimes has a sense of social care being a slight Cinderella to healthcare. If we merge those two inspectorates, we will see that help to strike the right balance in the way in which those services are provided and the quality of those services. I recognise that there is uncertainty and concern among staff and people working in those areas.
	I, too, pay tribute to the very good work of the Healthcare Commission and the Commission for Social Care Inspection, but we will take this forward in consultation with everyone. It is certainly our intention not to disrupt the important work that they do.
	My noble friend Lord Mitchell raised the difficult and important issue of the boycott of Jewish universities by the AUT. I assure my noble friend that we deplore any acts of racial or religious intolerance in higher education. We are concerned by the reports of an increase in anti-Semitism in the UK and are committed to tackling any form of anti-Semitism and racial intolerance. The DfES is committed to encouraging the higher education sector to ensure that discrimination has no place in any of its policies or practices.
	We welcome the fact that the AUT is due to reconsider its position on 26 May. We fully support academic freedom, and we appreciate the independence of the AUT. But, as friends of both Israel and Palestinians, we can best encourage both sides to take the steps needed to progress through close engagement. I hope that there will be a peaceful outcome to that problem.
	I listened with some amazement to the tutorial on legislation from the noble Baroness, Lady O'Neill. I do not agree with her about the Human Tissue Bill. I am not sure that this is the debate in which to examine the framing of legislation in general.
	I have not been able to respond to all the points that have been made. I shall address a few of those made from the Front Benches. I was glad to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, that the acceptance of targets has spread to the Liberal Democrats' inner workings. That was reassuring. My noble friend Lord Adonis will write to her about Emmanuel College.
	The noble Baroness made a couple of other points. Bradford made its own decision to apply for foundation trust status. No one forced them to apply. I should add that, although she may not have heard choice being mentioned on the doorstep, when we consulted the public before the choice White Paper, the public overwhelmingly wanted more choice over the way that their health services were delivered. As we always say, we are a listening government. We listened to the voices that were raised in that consultation.
	I say to the noble Baroness, regarding the use of private sector services, that they are still a small proportion, even after the new contracts that were announced by the Secretary of State last week, to which the noble Earl, Lord Howe, referred. When those contracts are completed, the independent sector will be spending about 1 per cent of the NHS budget, in elective surgery and diagnostics. That is a pretty small proportion of the total spend, so we need to keep some type of balance.
	The noble Earl, Lord Howe, made an extremely important and thoughtful speech about the effect of some of the reforms on the NHS. I take seriously his points—they are matters that we are concerned about. We want to ensure that the reforms gel together, that they are introduced in a manner that does not damage the NHS and that they are taken forward in an orderly manner, with consent in the NHS and without damaging the services that are provided to patients. I am sure that we shall return to such issues as the Session proceeds.
	The issues of choice and contestability were raised several times. The issues raised were not just about diversity and community. Giving patients more choice and control over their healthcare and making that care more personalised are at the heart of our NHS reforms. By the end of this year, patients will have a choice of at least four to five providers when their GPs refer them for hospital care. From next year, they will be able to choose from an extended range of providers. Alongside that, we have committed ourselves to reducing waiting time to no more than 18 weeks from GP referral to hospital treatment—that is, with no hidden waits for diagnostics.
	We simply cannot do that—we cannot achieve that improved access—without some involvement of private sector providers, particularly in the area of diagnostics. That is not a criticism of the NHS but a facing of the reality that if we want to improve patients' access to services, we have to bring in that additional capacity. We can have a debate about whether it has been done in the right and proper way, but if you look at the arithmetic, you can see that there is not much chance that you can actually improve services for patients without bringing in that extra capacity. That is why we need to use the independent sector in elective surgery and the areas of diagnostics. All I would say to people is that, if they do not like that, they should go and talk to some of the elderly people who have had their cataract operations done much quicker as a result of some of those provisions.
	In education, the same policies of contestability and choice apply, with alternative providers. But again, as with health, that does not amount to privatisation. The new providers are all working to provide public services in education and health, free to their users. That greater diversity and choice will continue to be a key feature of this Government's programme, legislatively and otherwise. But we recognise that improvements in health and education that are being made are very much down to the hard work of the doctors, nurses, teachers and many other professional and support workers who are working in our public services—and, dare I say it, managers as well.
	On Question, Motion agreed to nemine dissentiente; the said Address to be presented to Her Majesty by the Lord Chamberlain.

House adjourned at seventeen minutes past nine o'clock.